Popular:
 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  on  

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.

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    6 Things You Didn’t Know About Firefox OS

    Firefox OS is all over the tech news and for good reason:  Mozilla's finally given web developers the platform that they need to create apps the way they've been creating them for years -- with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.  Firefox OS has been rapidly improving...

  • By
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    JavaScript Speech Recognition

    Speech recognition software is becoming more and more important; it started (for me) with Siri on iOS, then Amazon's Echo, then my new Apple TV, and so on.  Speech recognition is so useful for not just us tech superstars but for people who either want to work "hands...

  • By
    Rotate Elements with CSS Transformations

    I've gone on a million rants about the lack of progress with CSS and how I'm happy that both JavaScript and browser-specific CSS have tried to push web design forward. One of those browser-specific CSS properties we love is CSS transformations. CSS transformations...

Discussion

  1. Luke Pettway

    I was just wondering how to do this, thanks!

  2. 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

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!