How to embed downloading date in filename

[urza]

Hi,
I know there is unix timestamp, but I would like to have just YYYYMMDD date of when the video was downloaded as part of the output filename. Is this possible?

[yan12125]

%(upload_date)s should work.

[urza]

I am not interested in "upload date" but "download date".

[yan12125]

Sorry I misunderstood you. It's not possible with youtube-dl only. An approach can be using --exec with some script to rename the downloaded file.

[urza]

Can I suggest this as feature somewhere?

[phihag]

What's wrong with

youtube-dl -o "$(date +%Y%m%d)-%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s" your_url_here

or an equivalent if your shell does not conform to POSIX? I don't think we need to add any features to youtube-dl for that. Or are you really running youtube-dl jobs that span days?

[yan12125]

Thanks @phihag. I wasn't aware of such a simple solution.

[urza]

Excellent, I didn't know I could do this. I am not as experienced with command line.
Maybe it would be worth noting in the documentation?

[phihag]

Not really, composability is a primary feature of any decent shell. There are thousands of simple and useful compositions, and billions in general. We can't list them all, and that's out of scope of youtube-dl.

[urza]

Hi, could you help me please?
I tried to put the date in the filename as suggested by adding the $(date +%Y%m%d) into the output filename but youtube-dl is returning and error when I try to download the videos:
"ERROR: Error in output template: unsupported format character 'Y' (0x59) at index 54 (encoding: 'UTF-8')"

My download command is in file dowload_yt.sh and looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl -o '/path/$(date +%Y%m%d)-%(uploader)s-%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s' -w --restrict-filenames 'https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq4GeMnWONsS8bLDYF8zvpfz1fEyk22T9' -i

Thanks for any help.

[urza]

Nevermind, I have it working:

#!/bin/bash
-o '/path/'$(date +"%Y%m%d")'-%(uploader)s-%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s' -w --restrict-filenames ...