Even though I'm almost certain there's an easier way to do this, I'm too lazy to learn it at the moment.

@hrisskar To be honest, I'm kind of overwhelmed by seeing that ` && youtube-dl`. It's convention for a CLI tool that accepts one path or URL as input to accept any number of them in a single invocation.

Also, single quotes are only needed for a YouTube or Invidious URL if it contains ampersands which the shell would otherwise interpret as the "run in background" version of a semicolon.

Example:

youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIANk7zQ05w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwe-pA6TaZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7X6Yeydgyg

@ssokolow Sadly, youtube-dl sticks its nose straight up and REFUSES to work for me unless I add those single quotes. Though IIRC it's because I'm using zsh rather than bash; took me a bit of websearching before I learned that's why youtube-dl wouldn't work after migrating from #Mint to #Manjaro !

@hrisskar That's odd. I'm also using zsh and it works fine here.

Probably some zsh config flag that Manjaro defaults differently to Debian-family distros.

Try sticking echo on the beginning of the command and see what it prints. Maybe it's interpreting the ? as a globbing character and it's configured to remove unmatched globs rather than passing them through as literals. (Bash has an option to do that too)

@ssokolow Something like this:

youtube-dl -ciw https://invidio.us/watch?v=dFDgf33gSf -o /run/media/blah/Blah de Blah/ya ya/%(title)s.%(ext)s

@hrisskar Oh, you've got an alias or shell function redefining it.

Tell me what `which youtube-dl` says and I'll tell you how to alter it to handle multiple arguments properly.

@ssokolow

@hrisskar Sorry. Force of habit. I'm used to using Markdown code snippet syntax everywhere.

Tell me what "which youtube-dl" (without quotes of any kind) says.

@ssokolow
/usr/bin/youtube-dl

@hrisskar Hmm. Unlike bash, zsh's "which" is a shell builtin, so it'll identify functions and aliases.

That it gave you a path suggests that it's getting converted to "youtube-dl -ciw ..." some other way. (Or I misunderstood you.)

First, try prefixing it with "command" to see if that alters its behaviour (eg. "command youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc4xYacTu-E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2br1fAKOGU")

("command" tells a shell like bash or zsh to bypass aliases, functions, builtins, etc. and call the on-disk command)

@hrisskar Oh, correction. Put quotes around that. Right now, I just want to get you to reliable not needing ` && youtube-dl` while I find the name of the shell option I suspect of being the culprit for needing the quotes.

@ssokolow Here's what happened (I left out extra flags and such):