Can not use youtube-dl on M1 Mac - env: python: No such file or directory

A three things to check since I know nothing about YouTube-dl. EIther one will prevent it from working:

1. YouTube-dl may not be Python 3 compatible and that will end things abruptly.
2. The application may expect the presence of Apple's Python-Objective-C bridge and that will not be present after Apple removed Python 2.7.18 from Monterey 12.3.1. It won't be present in any Python3 distribution either. Result: dead script.
3. Timothyong's comments about a Bash dependency by YouTube-dl.

Did you ever figure this out? I wrestled with it for hours in March. I eventually found a site that explained to update Python using "brew" commands, but that still didn't work until I found a comment to put the YouTube address in single quotes:

youtube-dl 'link goes here'

and that worked for that session. I just came back to it today and cannot get it to work at all. Again, same error messages. It's maddening when Apple makes a change to the OS that breaks things like this.

Yeah, I'm not to keen on that myself. I did find 4K Video Downloader which is free for like 30 daily downloads and works well enough for what I want. I just want to know why it worked the first time and not the second when literally nothing changed with my system. Weird.

Apple removed the Python 2.7.18 distribution from macOS 12.3. You can install the full Python 3.10.4 distribution which will install in /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework and as a folder in your Applications. It also links its binaries idle3, pip3, python3 into /usr/local/bin. You can access these once you alter the PATH in your shell startup file:

export PATH="$HOME:/usr/local/bin:${PATH}"



Then you can access the Python3 interpreter from the Terminal prompt, or from scripts that use the following first line:

!#/usr/bin/env python3

You can also reinstall the deprecated Python 2.7.18 from the above link, and it will link its binaries idle, pip2, and python into /usr/local/bin. I have done this on macOS 12.3 and both versions of Python live comfortably in that /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions location. A Python 2.7 folder is also added to Applications.

I do not recommend linking Python3 to a Python namespace.

Maybe changing your terminal's shell from zsh to bash will work. It worked for me.

Here's the terminal that changes your terminal from zsh to bash: chsh -s /bin/bash

Also, adding quotation in front of the link might help, it looks like this: youtube-dl 'your URL goes here'

hope this helps

source: https://superuser.com/questions/649635/zsh-says-no-matches-found-when-trying-to-download-video-with-youtube-dl

https://www.howtogeek.com/444596/how-to-change-the-default-shell-to-bash-in-macos-catalina/