Very happy you had fun making the little script! One thing that will become important pretty quick if you continue making these scripts is that it’s almost always better to wrap your variables in quotes - so it becomes yt-dlp -x “$a”. It’s okay here but if you ever paste something that has a space in it, this will keep it together ‘as one’.

If you want to expand your knowledge with this, some fruitful paths to go down are the following:

• can you find a way to download multiple urls one after the other if you paste them all at once? (Multiple arguments)
• can you find a way to ask the user for these multiple urls one after the other? (loops)
• and can you find a way to have it ask until you hit enter without a url pasted and only then it starts? (conditionals and test)

The last one is already quite a bit advanced but if you can do that you have enough of the ‘programming’ basics of the shell down to a degree that you can create many little helpers like this with ease.

Of course don’t feel forced to do any of that - if you’re happy with the improvement as-is, that’s all you need to enjoy the fun of Linux!

It uses a completely different paradigm of process chaining and management than POSIX and the underlying Unix architecture.

I think that’s exactly it for most people. The socket, mount, timer unit files; the path/socket activations; the After=, Wants=, Requires= dependency graph, and the overall architecture as a more unified ‘event’ manager are what feels really different than most everything else in the Linux world.

That coupled with the ini-style VerboseConfigurationNamesForThatOneThing and the binary journals made me choose a non-systemd distro for personal use - where I can tinker around and it all feels nice and unix-y. On the other hand I am really thankful to have systemd in the server space and for professional work.