Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Open Files from Command Line on OS X

By David Walsh on April 24, 2015

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.

Recent Features

By Eduardo BouçasJanuary 5, 2015
Write Simple, Elegant and Maintainable Media Queries with Sass
I spent a few months experimenting with different approaches for writing simple, elegant and maintainable media queries with Sass. Each solution had something that I really liked, but I couldn't find one that covered everything I needed to do, so I ventured into creating my...
By David WalshNovember 21, 2011
Page Visibility API
One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

Incredible Demos

By David WalshAugust 22, 2011
JavaScript and CSS Spinners with spin.js
I think it's safe to say the days of using images to provide the "small touches" are over. We can now safely create gradients, drop shadows, rounded corners, and scaled, rotated, transformed animations. It seems we've now moved on to replacing...
By David WalshMay 22, 2013
CSS content and attr
CSS is becoming more and more powerful but in the sense that it allows us to do the little things easily. There have been larger features added like transitions, animations, and transforms, but one feature that goes under the radar is generated content. You saw a...

Discussion

Luke Pettway
I was just wondering how to do this, thanks!
Eric
When you use -a, you don’t need to write the path.
```
open -a Firefox portrait.png
```
…would do the same. :)

The -a handler is great when you want to open some program one doesn’t really know (eg remember) exactly where it is.

Like:
```
open -a "Wi-Fi Diagnostics"
```
// that one is in /System/Library/CoreServices

Open Files from Command Line on OS X

Recent Features

Write Simple, Elegant and Maintainable Media Queries with Sass

Page Visibility API

Incredible Demos

JavaScript and CSS Spinners with spin.js

CSS content and attr

Discussion