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I recently installed youtube-dl.

I first used apt-get to install it. However, the version was outdated and there were problems. I was able to look through the documentation using man youtube-dl.

In their documentation I found out that they recommend following their manual installation guide. So I followed their instructions and reinstalled using wget and the program worked fine. However, I can no longer access their documentation using man youtube-dl.

Instead of the manual, I get:

No manual entry for youtube-dl See 'man 7 undocumented' for help when manual pages are not available.

Is there a way for me to manually add in the documentation from their github? So this is also sort of a general question as well for any other command that doesn't have a manual attached after installation.

madisonquota
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2 Answers2

4

Try and re-install the manual page itself: see https://askubuntu.com/a/244810/15811

Because ... After I did this I got the normal manual page:

$ sudo wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

$ sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

First page:

YOUTUBE-DL(1)                                                    YOUTUBE-DL(1)

NAME
       youtube-dl - download videos from youtube.com or other video platforms

SYNOPSIS
       youtube-dl [OPTIONS] URL [URL...]

DESCRIPTION
       youtube-dl   is   a   command-line  program  to  download  videos  from
       YouTube.com and a few more sites.  It requires the Python  interpreter,
       version  2.6, 2.7, or 3.2+, and it is not platform specific.  It should
       work on your Unix box, on Windows or on macOS.  It is released  to  the
       public domain, which means you can modify it, redistribute it or use it
       however you like.

OPTIONS
       -h, --help
              Print this help text and exit

       --version
              Print program version and exit

Though it does not matter much: you can get the same information you are asking for when doing:

youtube-dl --help
Rinzwind
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  • When you told me a few days ago you made have your points from man pages I bet they weren't all like this answer :p – WinEunuuchs2Unix Apr 01 '18 at 02:12
  • Thanks. Where did you get the manual page from? I had to fork and copy the README.md file from their github into a new file, rename it, and put it into the man1 folder. It works, but the formatting of the man page is all messed up. Where did you get the original manual page from? – madisonquota Apr 01 '18 at 03:37
  • @madisonquota I got it from the download :X i did nothing special – Rinzwind Apr 01 '18 at 06:42
  • @Rinzwind Thanks for you help man, but I figured out a way to get the manual with proper formatting (see my reply below). I wanted to re-install it to see if I could get the manual like you did, but i don't know how uninstall (or which files to delete) since I installed using wget. – madisonquota Apr 02 '18 at 07:38
1

Since I knew that using apt-get install youtube-dl installed a working manual, I re-installed using apt-get, copied the manual /usr/share/man/man1/youtube-dl.1.gz and put it into /usr/local/share/man/man1/. Then I did apt-get remove youtube-dl. Now, the newer youtube-dl program that I installed using wget is referring to the old manual page that I took from the apt-get version (which is now removed). Formatting is all correct too.

Probably not the best way to do it and the documentation is probably outdated. But for the basic options, it will do for now.

madisonquota
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