Shell Scripts cause youtube-dl to Simultaneous Download

[japzone]

I'm using v2012.02.27 and whenever I try to make a Shell Script with youtube-dl it will start downloading all the queued commands simultaneously. For instance, I'm trying to download certain videos from several playlists. I create a Shell Script(Bash) to execute each youtube-dl command seperately so only one video is downloaded at a time. However when I execute this script it starts running each command at the same time. No matter what I put between the commands (read, echo, ect...) it would continue Downloading all the videos at once while also running thrue the inbetween commands. The videos do download, but if I have 12 commands queued I get 12 videos downloading at the same time, which is never a good idea(especially when I'm using WiFi and Bandwidth is limited). Can this be fixed? As it kind-of defeats the purpose of using youtube-dl for me if I can't use it to batch download videos in a uniform manner.

[japzone]

Ahh, I found the issue. When you copy links from Youtube often there is extra stuff tacked to the end of the URL, like what page you clicked the link on and stuff like that. It seems that when this stuff is left on it causes a bug in youtube-dl and it'll start downloading everything simultaneously. However when I removed the extra stuff and just had the "/watch?v=xxxxxxx" or "playlist?list=xxxxxxxx" parts in the url everything worked fine.

The issue isn't urgent as simply removing this extra stuff on the url fixes the problem but it is inconvenient so you may want to look into it.

[FiloSottile]

Please read the FAQ. And go searching for the meaning of & in bash. It is a good habit to always put stuff in "", also.

[phihag]

This is a feature of your shell and has nothing to do with youtube-dl.

A common mistake is not to escape the &. Putting URLs in quotes should solve this problem.