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Comment by JadeNB | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

    $ 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!

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.

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.

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

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 =

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