[JadeNB]

> youtube-dl actually has quite sane defaults too; e.g. "youtube-dl https://......" will Just Work (TM).

Are you sure that this is true? Starting many updates ago, but continuing into the present (I just updated to 2016.04.06 to be sure), I encountered a weird situation where

    $ ./youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE

fails but

    $ ./youtube-dl wbKJt1NQtZE

works. I have no problem with the second working, but don't understand why the first fails. It seems to be fine for other video services; only YouTube requires this URL-processing step.

[chriswarbo]

    $ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
    [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading webpage
    [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading video info webpage
    [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Extracting video information
    [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading MPD manifest
    WARNING: Requested formats are incompatible for merge and will be merged into mkv.
    [download] Destination: True Detective - My Least Favorite Life - Lera Lynn Scene-wbKJt1NQtZE.f136.mp4
    [download]  19.3% of 35.60MiB at  1.51MiB/s ETA 00:18

Seems to work for me. I always double-quote the parameter anyway (I never trust the shell to handle my strings...)

I just tried `youtube-dl wbKJt1NQtZE` and that works too. I didn't know the "v" parameter could be given like that!

[JadeNB]

In case anyone else hits this (admittedly very specific) problem, nathyong (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11461326 )'s suggestion, and a subsequent USE (http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/276731/shell-eating-...) question, made it clear that my issue is that I had some time turned on `nullglob`, so `https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE ` was being taken as a very strange, certainly non-matching, glob.

[JadeNB]

Very strange. Perhaps it's some setup- or platform-dependent thing; I will file an issue. Thanks for checking!

EDIT: Very strange; I thought I'd give a try to what seemed a throwaway comment in your post, about quoting the string, and that fixed it. Thanks!

Without the double quotes (which seemed to be unnecessary for you), I still get:

    $ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
    Usage: youtube-dl [OPTIONS] URL [URL...]

    youtube-dl: error: You must provide at least one URL.
    Type youtube-dl --help to see a list of all options.

I guess that some alias is grabbing some part of the URL string.

[nathyong]

It's possible your shell has some kind of regular expression magic enabled that is eating the '?' and the '=' characters:

  $ echo youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v\=wbKJt1NQtZE
  youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
  
  $ echo youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
  zsh: no matches found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE

[JadeNB]

Interesting! It seems that my `echo` is eating any substrings involving `?`.

    $ bash --version
    GNU bash, version 4.3.42(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0)
    Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
    License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

    This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
    There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

    $ echo a ? = =?
    a =