youtube-dl: zsh: no matches found:

Question

From Catalina OS X:

youtube-dl --version                                  

2020.09.06

youtube-dl  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qohQD51F5bM

zsh: no matches found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qohQD51F5bM

• I have successfully used YouTube-dl on said OS X machine.

• The URL is good

Questions

1. What exactly is the problem?

2. How to overcome said problem? Thank you.

Update

Enclosing the URL in single quotes overcame the problem. What exactly is it about the URL that requires the quote?

Answer 1

Always use either single 'text' or (preferably) double "text" quotes when passing links, email and passwords. Different OS handle input differently.

I believe in your case (very rarely use MacOS) the ? is triggering something.
You could simply try to remove the ? from the url and see if it takes the input - obviously youtube-dl will fail because of invalid url.
But that way you can check if the problem is related to the ?.

Answer 2

Put a backslash \ in front of the ?.