Henk, thanks again. I agree 100% and I do understand that one should not do things as root unless necessary – for example when installing a package such as youtube-dl. And so I cannot explain why after initially successfully using youtube-dl in the shell as user and finding the videos in my home directory, thereafter I had some sort of brain lock and instead started using youtube-dl in the shell as root. At that point I did not realize my mistake and was saying to myself, “Where are my videos? They were here the last time I did this.”
I’m sure this “brain fart” must be unfathomable to you and the other “gurus” on the list, and it’s really embarrassing to me.
So in the future I’ll be sure to remember not to run programs such as youtube-dl as root. Log out of root; log back in as user. Maybe I should tattoo those words on the inside of my eyelids so every time I blink I’ll see them.
As you said, “….downloading videos is hardly root’s business…”
I have cleared all those “lost” videos from root’s home directory (thank you “ls”).
