I'm running a centos 6 server with rtorrent-0.9.4-3.el6.x86_64. As the subject line says rtorrent will not obey the download location in .rtorrent.rc. The location used to be /media/usb and I changed it to /home/videos and even deleted the directory /media/usb but when I start rtorrent t recreates /media/usb and starts putting stuff there. This is baffling. I've also tried # rtorrent -d /home/videos but it doesn't work. Somehow rtorrent is cemented to /media/usb but i don't know how or where. I have a copy of the original downloads from /media/usb in /home/videos and I just want rtorrent to carry on as normal with what it had. Thanks for any help.

did you create /home/videos? does rtorrent have permissions to write to it?

yes I created /home/videos. I run rtorrent as root so i does have permission to write.

Running as root is a terrible idea.

Also doing so may affect how the rtorrent.rc file works. The patch should be within a users home and might need to use full path in rc.

ok thanks but I've always run rtorrent as root (several years) and there have never been a problem like this.

root is not a magical spell that will give you everything.
i asked if rtorrent has permission to write to that folder; you have not answered that question.
who knows, maybe rtorrent runs as its own unprivileged user? a simple would already create a little clarity.
then find out under which user rtorrent's main process runs, maybe with 'top'.

thanks for your response. I followed jefro's advice and I'm now running rtorrent as a user. But when I start rtorrent and try to get a torrent going the error message is
so the original problem still exists. In .rtorrent.rc the download directory is specified as /home/videos but rtorrent is still cemented to /media/usb and I can't work out how to correct this. Thanks for any further advice.

can you test if your user configuration is being parsed at all?

i don't use rtorrent, but maybe you can find something here:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/RTorrent

thanks but I gave up in the end. I deleted all my downloads, all my torrent files and restarted. rtorrent is now saving to the correct directory. I discovered the .torrent files in /.session were hardwired to /media/usb. I tried a global replacement but it didn't work so I decided to scrap everything and start again. At least it's saving to the correct location now. Thanks for the feedback here.

not hardwired, but that was the location when you added the torrent and it's tricky to change it afterwards.
this is not specific to rtorrent, i'm experiencing the same with transmission.