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

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.

3 Answers

Try quoting the URL, e.g.

youtube-dl '{video URL}' 

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

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.

You can disable globbing for all commands with:

unsetopt nomatch 

You can put it in ~/.zshrc.