I wanted an alias or function to use youtube-dl in the background.
Looking around the web lots of people seemed to want this and most of them were banging their heads against a wall due to:

A) bash quoting
B) backgrounding dying when their terminal closed
C) passing the argument (url in my case) to the function

Here’s a simple function I whipped up that seems to ‘just works’™:
function yt
{
  nohup youtube-dl "$1" --no-progress 2>&1 > youtube-dl-"$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)".log &
}
And if you don’t want logs, simply send the output to /dev/null:

Sam McLeod

A short bash function using `nohup` to run youtube-dl in the background, solving common issues like bash quoting, processes dying when the terminal closes, and passing URL arguments. Two variants are shown: one that writes timestamped log files and one that discards output to /dev/null.

Run youtube-dl (or similar) in the background