Open Files from Command Line on OS X
I'm as much of a fan of application UIs as anyone else but I'm finding myself working more and more from the command line lately. Much of that is becoming obsessed with media manipulation but I'm forcing myself to use less UIs so that I can understand what's under the hood of my favorite utilities.
One common case for running any app is opening an existing file, like an HTML file in a browser or a document in Pages. To open a file on Mac OS X from the command line, type the following:
open portrait.png
The above does not specify an app to open the given file in -- the default app for that file type will be used. To open a file in a specific app, use the -a argument:
open -a /Applications/Firefox.app portrait.png
You can also open a URL directly from the command line:
open https://davidwalsh.name/
You'd expect opening a file from command line to be easy and I'm happy to confirm to you that it is.
![39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla]()
In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...
![Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS]()
Introduction
For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular.
In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...
![iPhone-Style Passwords Using MooTools PassShark]()
Every once in a while I come across a plugin that blows me out of the water and the most recent culprit is PassShark: a MooTools plugin that duplicates the iPhone's method of showing/hiding the last character in a password field. This gem of...
![jQuery Comment Preview]()
I released a MooTools comment preview script yesterday and got numerous requests for a jQuery version. Ask and you shall receive! I'll use the exact same CSS and HTML as yesterday.
The XHTML
The CSS
The jQuery JavaScript
On the keypress and blur events, we validate and...
I was just wondering how to do this, thanks!
When you use
-a, you don’t need to write the path.…would do the same. :)
The
-ahandler is great when you want to open some program one doesn’t really know (eg remember) exactly where it is.Like:
// that one is in /System/Library/CoreServices