Zsh says "no matches found" when trying to download video with youtube-dl

Question

I downloaded youtube-dl using pip on CrunchBang (a Debian Wheezy distro). When I run

youtube-dl {video URL}

I get

zsh: no matches found: {video URL}

I guess it has something to do with zsh, because I found some users on Arch forums complaining about it. When I switched to bash it worked.

@Ramhound well switching to bash is not a big deal, but why switching to bash every time you want to download a video? besides i was working in virualenv switched to bash to try it and now my virtualenvwrapper is messed up, i need to uninstall it for it to work again stackoverflow.com/questions/11507186/… — Lynob, Sep 24, 2013 at 12:29
this command solved my issue: setopt +o nomatch Ref => unix.stackexchange.com/questions/310540/… — Paramesh, Sep 9, 2017 at 10:19

Daniel Andersson · Accepted Answer · 2013-09-24 12:26:26Z

118

Try quoting the URL, e.g.

youtube-dl '{video URL}'

in your notation, to avoid possible interpretation of special characters in the string.

answered Sep 24, 2013 at 12:26

Daniel Andersson

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why no one mention that? it works, i will accept it in 6 minutes, the system doesn't let me accept it right away
– Lynob
Sep 24, 2013 at 12:31
3

@Fischer By the way: my Zsh (on OS X in iTerm2 with oh-my-zsh) automatically escapes shell-specific characters like & and !, so there might be an option to configure that.
– slhck
Sep 24, 2013 at 12:49
@slhck i just tried it on xterm doesn't work, i don't have xterm2, i'm using oh-my-zsh too.. yes i guess i have to configure my zsh for that, i guess bash does it by default because i haven't configured it, still using the default configuration
– Lynob
Sep 24, 2013 at 16:59
2

@Fischer: You'll need to load the url-quote-magic funtion to get special shellcharacters to be quotes automatically in URLs: autoload -Uz url-quote-magic; zle -N self-insert url-quote-magic
– mpy
Oct 3, 2013 at 9:48
3

Quotes. I feel like an idiot..
– myol
Jun 22, 2016 at 18:03

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ubershmekel · Accepted Answer · 2020-07-01 21:52:25Z

15

This was already mentioned in the comments, but it deserves its own answer:

autoload -Uz bracketed-paste-magic
zle -N bracketed-paste bracketed-paste-magic

autoload -Uz url-quote-magic
zle -N self-insert url-quote-magic

This causes pasted URLs to be automatically quoted, without needing to disable globbing.

Place the above snippet in your ~/.zshrc file to persist this setting for future terminal sessions.

ubershmekel

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answered Aug 3, 2017 at 1:06

Radon Rosborough

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Eyal Levin · Accepted Answer · 2020-05-24 19:58:28Z

6

You can disable globbing for all commands with:

unsetopt nomatch

You can put it in ~/.zshrc.

answered May 24, 2020 at 19:58

Eyal Levin

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Shouldn't that be setopt nomatch?
– Tom Hale
Sep 28, 2020 at 5:30
@TomHale no, because nomatch is the setting that causes errors on unmatched patterns. Disabling it can also be done with no_nomatch.
– detuur
Nov 10, 2021 at 16:58

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3 Answers 3