youtube-dl is unable to read cookies file for some reason, spits "ERROR: unable to open cookie file"

[gaurish]

youtube-dl is terminating with the error message:
ERROR: unable to open cookie file

But the thing is the file exists, has correct permissions & the path is correct too. please see the log below

$ ls /home/gaurish/cookie.txt 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 gaurish users 1.1K Feb  2 16:02 /home/gaurish/cookie.txt

$ youtube-dl --verbose --cookies /home/gaurish/cookie.txt http://youtube.com/XXXXXXX
ERROR: unable to open cookie file

$ youtube-dl --version
2013.01.13

so I can't think of another reason other than this could be a bug. Thoughts?

[phihag]

Are you sure the format of the cookie file is correct? Can you post an example file that causes the error? In any case, I added better debugging output in youtube-dl 2013.02.02. What output do you get with

sudo youtube-dl -U
youtube-dl -v BaW_jenozKc --cookies ~/cookie.txt --test

[phihag]

Sorry, but without any additional information, all we can do is speculate about the contents of the cookie file.

[gaurish]

The cookie format is wget compatible, generated using cookie.txt export google chrome extension.

Are you able to reproduce the behavior using cookie generated from this extension?

[gaurish]

Closing this as its too old

[phihag]

Sorry, I don't follow. Can you still reproduce the problem? If so, please say so and we'll reopen this issue. It would be nice if you could provide the output of strace, as that should be able to tell us with definitive knowledge whether file opening really fails.