terminal can't find youtube-dl to run, but nevertheless claims it is installed

newbiesforever · 09-02-2023, 10:08 AM

I tried to youtube-dl a URL, but the terminal said

Code:

Command 'youtube-dl' not found, but can be installed with:
sudo apt install youtube-dl

Okay, so perhaps I forgot to install it after my last re-installation of this distro. So I tried to install it, and to my puzzlement found:

Code:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
youtube-dl is already the newest version (1:2021.12.17-2~mx21+1).

What? These messages are between them claiming I do and do not have youtube-dl installed. What could be going on?

I'm fully aware that youtube-dl is controversial; but I'm going to use it, as long as it's available and I'm confident in my judgment that my recording of a certain video is legal...

Emerson · 09-02-2023, 10:48 AM

The command is not found because it is now yt-dlp.

pan64 · 09-02-2023, 10:52 AM

yes, the name of the package and the name of the executable are two different things. So you need to check it (and also you might need to check the location of it. Probably you need to adjust your PATH variable).

DavidMcCann · 09-02-2023, 10:59 AM

Try these commands

Code:

whereis youtube-dl
apt-cache showpkg youtube-dl

Actually, I think you will find yt-dlp rather better: new features
That's a new fork, not a rename as claimed at #2

Emerson · 09-02-2023, 11:15 AM

This is a new fork, but it provided youtube-dl command for convenience, until they dropped it. I am not sure what youtube-dl package apt installs, but since it has no youtube-dl command I assumed it is in actuality the new fork.

boughtonp · 09-02-2023, 12:05 PM

The software responsible for "...but can be installed with:" is command-not-found.

The logic seems to blindly check for a package matching the requested command's name without checking if that package actually provides that command.
//sources.debian.org/src/command-not-found/23.04.0-1/CommandNotFound/CommandNotFound.py/#L297

The command-not-found package depends on apt-file (which can do this), but it would appear at some point they stopped using it (a search only finds the changelog entries, not any usage).

Anyhow, the youtube-dl package in Debian 12 / Bookworm no longer contains the youtube-dl command (the one in Debian 11 Bullseye did).
//packages.debian.org/bookworm/all/youtube-dl/filelist
//packages.debian.org/bullseye/all/youtube-dl/filelist

There is a bug report against the youtube-dl package showing this is deliberate - and confirms it was clearly documented in the release notes.

The Bookworm youtube-dl package does depend on the yt-dlp package; personally, I would have also setup a /usr/bin/youtube-dl script which called "/usr/bin/yt-dlp --compat-options youtube-dl" so as to not break things.

Of course, this is all referencing Debian - the the presence of "~mx21+1" in the version suggests this is MX Linux (this should be stated in the first post!) and that MX Linux have modified something, so first step would be to check what they have modified.

In addition, if there aren't relevant release notes for upgrading MX Linux which mention this change, that should be reported as a bug to MX Linux.

newbiesforever · 09-02-2023, 12:06 PM

Thanks, I suspected this--I was hearing something of such changes. I think I had heard of the existence of yt-dip but didn't know that it has effectively replaced youtube-dl.