.youtube-dl/cache should live in $XDG_CACHE_HOME (~/.cache)

[joshtriplett]

youtube-dl creates a cache directory in .youtube-dl/cache. This directory should live in the standard cache directory, $XDG_CACHE_HOME (~/.cache if that's unset). See http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html for the standard specifying this and other standard directories (it's the same spec that specifies the ~/.config currently used for ~/.config/youtube-dl.conf).

Among other things, this will make it easier to exclude the cache from backups; many backup tools already know to skip ~/.cache , and even for those that don't, excluding one path proves easier than excluding one path per program.

[phihag]

What makes you think that the cache directory would be ~/.youtube-dl/cache? Both code and documentation state:

By default $XDG_CACHE_HOME/youtube-dl or ~/.cache/youtube-dl .

[joshtriplett]

I had a ~/.youtube-dl/cache directory in my home directory with a recent timestamp; presumably an older version uses that directory instead. Didn't occur to me that that might have already been changed.

[jaimeMF]

At first it used .cache, but it was changed in #1529. You can remove the youtube files inside the old direcotry.