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 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11507186/python-virtualenv-no-module-named-virtualenvwrapper-hook-loader — Lynob, Sep 24 '13 at 12:29
this command solved my issue: setopt +o nomatch Ref => https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/310540/how-to-get-rid-of-no-match-found-when-running-rm — Paramesh, Sep 09 '17 at 10:19

score 127 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 24 '13 at 12:26

127

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 '13 at 12:26

Daniel Andersson

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 '13 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 '13 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 '13 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 03 '13 at 09:48
3

Quotes. I feel like an idiot.. – myol Jun 22 '16 at 18:03

score 17 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 01 '20 at 21:52

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.

score 6 · Answer 3 · answered May 24 '20 at 19:58

6

You can disable globbing for all commands with:

unsetopt nomatch

You can put it in ~/.zshrc.

answered May 24 '20 at 19:58

Eyal Levin

Shouldn't that be `setopt nomatch`? – Tom Hale Sep 28 '20 at 05:30
@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 '21 at 16:58

3 Answers3