Torrents, typically ending in ".torrent", are control files for the peer-to-peer file sharing technology called BitTorrent.
It's actually pretty cool technology that really just boils down to another way to download files. So really, you just use .torrent files to download other files

BitTorrent is a distributed file distribution technology. Yes, "distributed distribution". When you download a file using BitTorrent, the file is actually broken up into chunks, that you BitTorrent client program then downloads and reassembled into the final file as the pieces arrive. To over-simplify, what makes it interesting are two things:
*The different chunks you download can all be coming from different machines. A BitTorrent client will connect to many other BitTorrent clients and download several chunks at once, in random order. In the long run this makes the protocol fairly efficient, and very nicely scalable - the more BitTorrent clients that are serving up a given file, the faster other clients can download it.

Answered by Yash , an ibibo Master, at 11:23 PM on July 06, 2008