Very happy you had fun making the little script! One thing that will become important pretty quick if you continue making these scripts is that it’s almost always better to wrap your variables in quotes - so it becomes yt-dlp -x “$a”. It’s okay here but if you ever paste something that has a space in it, this will keep it together ‘as one’.

If you want to expand your knowledge with this, some fruitful paths to go down are the following:

• can you find a way to download multiple urls one after the other if you paste them all at once? (Multiple arguments)
• can you find a way to ask the user for these multiple urls one after the other? (loops)
• and can you find a way to have it ask until you hit enter without a url pasted and only then it starts? (conditionals and test)

The last one is already quite a bit advanced but if you can do that you have enough of the ‘programming’ basics of the shell down to a degree that you can create many little helpers like this with ease.

Of course don’t feel forced to do any of that - if you’re happy with the improvement as-is, that’s all you need to enjoy the fun of Linux!

You’ll probably like this youtube channel then :)

https://www.youtube.com/@BreadOnPenguins

One of us! One of us!

Here is a script I wrote:

~/bin 0s  
> cat vget  
#!/usr/bin/env fish  
yt-dlp --embed-metadata --write-subs --embed-subs --write-thumbnail --prefer-free-formats -f "[height<=1080]" $argv  

this isn’t perfect but i made one when i wanted to fetch a video for a specific resolution (because i prefer 480)

ytgrab() {  
  local id="$1"  
  local res="${2:-480}" # default to 480  
  local url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%24id"  

  # fetch formats  
  local fmt  
  fmt=$(yt-dlp -F --cookies-from-browser vivaldi "$url")  

  # printing the format output  
  echo "$fmt"  

  # pick video format matching the requested resolution  
  local vfmt  
  vfmt=$(echo "$fmt" | awk -v r="${res}p" '$0 ~ r && /video/ {print $1}' | head -n1)  

  # pick best m4a audio  
  local afmt  
  afmt=$(echo "$fmt" | awk '/m4a/ && /audio/ {print $1}' | head -n1)  

  # safety check  
  if [ -z "$vfmt" ] || [ -z "$afmt" ]; then  
    echo "Could not find matching formats (video ${res}p or m4a audio)."  
    return 1  
  fi  

  echo fetching: yt-dlp -f ${vfmt}+${afmt} --cookies-from-browser vivaldi --write-subs --no-write-auto-subs --sub-lang "en.*" $url  
  yt-dlp -f "${vfmt}+${afmt}" --write-subs --cookies-from-browser vivaldi --no-write-auto-subs --sub-lang "en.*" "$url"  
}  

I have a similar scriptlet that I use to open YouTube URLs in mpv, using just and wl-clipboard… I just copy the URL and press my G1 key (it has a keybind of just yt-paste attached) which launches the yt-paste snippet below, reads the url from the clipboard, parses it and passes it to mpv.

# Parse the clipboard for YouTube URLs and open them in mpv
yt-paste:
  #!/usr/bin/env bash
  YOUTUBE_URL_REGEX="^https:\/\/(www\.youtube\.com\/watch\?v=|youtu\.be\/)[a-zA-Z0-9_-]{11}"
  YOUTUBE_PLAYLIST_URL_REGEX="^https:\/\/(www\.youtube\.com\/playlist\?list=)[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+"
  YOUTUBE_SHORTS_URL_REGEX="^https:\/\/(www\.youtube\.com\/shorts\/)[a-zA-Z0-9_-]{11}"
  # Youtube URL
  if [[ "$(wl-paste)" =~ $YOUTUBE_URL_REGEX ]]; then
    echo "Opening valid YouTube URL" >&2
    notify-send --app-name="YT-Paste" --icon=mpv --transient "Opening YouTube URL"
    mpv "$(wl-paste)"
  # Youtube Playlist URL
  elif [[ "$(wl-paste)" =~ $YOUTUBE_PLAYLIST_URL_REGEX ]]; then
    echo "Opening valid YouTube Playlist URL" >&2
    notify-send --app-name="YT-Paste" --icon=mpv --transient "Opening YouTube Playlist URL"
    mpv "$(wl-paste)"
  # Youtube Short URL
  elif [[ "$(wl-paste)" =~ $YOUTUBE_SHORTS_URL_REGEX ]]; then
    echo "Opening valid YouTube Shorts URL" >&2
    notify-send --app-name="YT-Paste" --icon=mpv --transient "Opening YouTube Shorts URL"
    mpv "$(wl-paste)"
  # No Match
  else
    echo "Clipboard does not contain a valid YouTube URL" >&2
    notify-send --app-name="YT-Paste" --icon=mpv --transient "Whoops!" "Clipboard does not contain a valid YouTube URL"
    exit 1
  fi

Amazing.

Injust switched a year ago and now I finally discovered bash scripts.

It is so mich easier, I also automated some manual tasks with Python scripts to name my PDFs, never would have done that with windows.

And the best part of it, it’s actually fun and I want to even do more.

As always I have to thank DJT, for make me switch. 🤣

awesome! I never would have thought to make something like that.

Well done, I never could use bash much but can’t deny its useful

I simply using local LLM for it

You could make it an alias and shorten the number of keystrokes

I prefer keeping my aliases in ~/.bash_aliases, which is sourced in my ~/.bashrc, ie

. ~/.bash_aliases

Then you would just need to source your bashrc to load it the first time.

Nice! I did mine as an alias:

alias yt='yt-dlp --remote-components ejs:github -f "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/mp4"'

And then just yt [URL] downloads the thing.