Windows executable has inconsistent Python version response and inability to update depending on current directory

[michealespinola]

Checklist

• I'm reporting a broken site support issue
• I've verified that I'm running youtube-dl version 2020.03.24
• I've checked that all provided URLs are alive and playable in a browser
• I've checked that all URLs and arguments with special characters are properly quoted or escaped
• I've searched the bugtracker for similar bug reports including closed ones
• I've read bugs section in FAQ

Verbose log

C:\Scripts>youtube-dl.exe --verbose --update
[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: ['--verbose', '--sub-lang', 'en,EN,en-gb,en-GB,EN-GB,en-ca,en-CA,EN-CA,en-ie,en-IE,EN-IE,en-us,en-US,EN-US,eng,ENG,english,English,ENGLISH,subtitles', '--write-sub', '--write-auto-sub', '--write-thumbnail', '--write-all-thumbnails', '--write-description', '--write-info-json', '--add-metadata', '--xattrs', '--external-downloader', 'aria2c', '--external-downloader-args', '-c -j 16 -s 16 -x 16 -k 5M --file-allocation=none', '--no-playlist', '--netrc', '--cookies', 'C:/Users/USER/common-info/cookies.txt', '--no-check-certificate', '--user-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/77.0.3865.90 Safari/537.36', '--abort-on-unavailable-fragment', '--socket-timeout', '30', '--retries', '999', '--hls-prefer-native', '--ffmpeg-location', 'C:/Program Files/ffmpeg/bin', '--merge-output-format', 'mkv', '--cache-dir', 'C:/Users/USER/AppData/Roaming/youtube-dl/cache', '--restrict-filenames', '--no-mtime', '--output', 'D:/Downloads/youtube-dl/%(extractor)s/%(title)s [%(resolution)s] [%(id)s].%(ext)s', '--download-archive', 'C:/Users/USER/AppData/Roaming/youtube-dl/download-archive.txt']
[debug] Custom config: []
[debug] Command-line args: ['--verbose', '--update']
[debug] Encodings: locale cp1252, fs utf-8, out utf-8, pref cp1252
[debug] youtube-dl version 2020.03.24
[debug] Python version 3.8.2 (CPython) - Windows-10-10.0.18362-SP0
[debug] exe versions: ffmpeg N-94066-g18dab6175b, ffprobe N-94066-g18dab6175b, phantomjs 2.1.1, rtmpdump 2.4
[debug] Proxy map: {}
It looks like you installed youtube-dl with a package manager, pip, setup.py or a tarball. Please use that to update.

Description

The above example log demonstrates two inconsistencies while running the youtube-dl.exe Windows executable via PATH environment variable execution instead of from the directory that youtube-dl.exe resides. In this example, its located in C:\bin but I am executing it from C:\Scripts:

1. The logged Python version is not accurate if Python is installed while NOT running youtube-dl.exe from its directory and instead relying on PATH environment variable execution. The example reflects that I have Python 3.8.2 installed on my computer, but youtube-dl.exe should be showing the embedded version of 3.4.4 - which is correctly shown if youtube-dl.exe is run from the directory it actually resides in.
2. Same scenario: youtube-dl.exe will not update while NOT running youtube-dl.exe from its directory and instead relying on PATH environment variable execution. If run from its directory it works as expected/normal.

To summarize: Both above-described situations will work normally/properly if youtube-dl.exe is run from its directory. The problem is when run via PATH environment variable execution. Downloading and other functions otherwise work fine via PATH environment variable execution.

[dstftw]

1. Wrong.
2. Wrong.

C:\Scripts>where youtube-dl.exe
C:\Bin\youtube-dl.exe

C:\Scripts>python --version
Python 2.7.16

C:\Scripts>youtube-dl.exe --verbose --update
[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: []
[debug] Custom config: []
[debug] Command-line args: ['--verbose', '--update']
[debug] Encodings: locale cp1251, fs mbcs, out cp866, pref cp1251
[debug] youtube-dl version 2020.03.24
[debug] Python version 3.4.4 (CPython) - Windows-10-10.0.18362
[debug] exe versions: none
[debug] Proxy map: {}
youtube-dl is up-to-date (2020.03.24)

[dstftw]

Your situation is youtube-dl installed via pip that is earlier in PATH than youtube-dl.exe so that pip version is always executed. Apart from sutiation when running from C:/bin - in this case exe version is executed.

[michealespinola]

You're absolutely right, and I apologize for wasting your time.

I have no recollection of installing it with pip, but there is a 95 kb youtube-dl.exe in my Python/Scripts directory. So clearly at some point, I did.

Thank you very much for pointing out what I had done!