Automating YouTube Video Imports into My Website with One Magic Bash Line

Introduction

Over the past months I’ve been downloading my own YouTube videos with yt-dlp. It’s a fantastic tool for archiving, and I’ve built up a folder full of .mp4, .webm, and .mkv files.

But here’s the boring part: every time I wanted to put those videos on my personal website, I had to manually write <a> tags for each one. Copying file names, escaping spaces, renaming stuff… too much grunt work.

So I decided to automate it.

And the result is this single, magic line of Bash:

find . -type f \( -name "*.webm" -o -name "*.mp4" -o -name "*.mkv" \) -printf "%P\0" | xargs -0 -n1 bash -c 'X="$1"; clean=$(echo "$X" | sed "s/ /_/g"); echo "<a href="/assets/common_files/$clean">$X</a><br>"' X1
    

Breaking Down the Magic

• find . -type f \( -name "*.webm" -o -name "*.mp4" -o -name "*.mkv" \)
  This searches the current directory (and subdirectories) for my video files. I only want mp4, mkv, or webm.
• -printf "%P\0"
  Normally find outputs paths starting with ./. With %P, that’s stripped away. The \0 means each result is separated by a null byte instead of a newline — very handy if filenames have spaces or weird characters.
• xargs -0 -n1
  This reads the null-terminated list and passes each filename one by one into the next command (-n1 = one argument at a time). The -0 matches the \0 from find.
• bash -c '…' X1
  This runs a little subshell script for each file. X="$1" grabs the filename argument passed in (the X1 at the end is just a dummy placeholder).
• clean=$(echo "$X" | sed "s/ /_/g")
  Replace spaces in the filename with underscores, so links don’t break.
• echo "<a href="/assets/common_files/$clean">$X</a>"
  Finally, output an <a> tag where the href points to the cleaned filename, but the link text stays the original filename.

The End Result

Run that command in my videos folder, and out comes a neat list of HTML links, like this:

<a href="../../static/My_Video_Title.mp4">My Video Title.mp4</a>
<a href="../../static/Another_Episode.webm">Another Episode.webm</a>
<a href="../../static/Archive_Talk.mkv">Archive Talk.mkv</a>
    

Now I just copy-paste the output straight into my site’s HTML. No hand-editing, no mistakes, no wasted time.

Why I Love This

• Fully automated. Every new video I download is just one command away from being “web-ready.”
• Robust against weird filenames. Thanks to null separation and xargs -0, it handles spaces, quotes, even oddball characters.
• Hackable. Want Markdown links instead of HTML? Just tweak the echo. Want a custom URL path? Change the prefix.

This is the beauty of the UNIX philosophy: small tools, combined cleverly, save you hours of repetitive work.

🔥 Now my YouTube video archive basically imports itself onto my website with a single line.

Worth mentioning

find . -type f \( -name "*.webm" -o -name "*.mp4" -o -name "*.mkv" \) -printf "%P\0"   | xargs -0 -n1 bash -c 'X="$1"; clean=$(echo "$X" | sed "s/ /_/g"); mv "$X" $clean' X1

to rename all my files without any whitespace, then just an ls > markup.html