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 David WalshNovember 26, 2012
Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS
CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more. I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...
By David WalshOctober 6, 2020
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...

Incredible Demos

By David WalshNovember 19, 2009
MooTools OpenLinks Class – Updated
A long time back I coded a MooTools class called OpenLinks. The class is quite useful but the code...sucks. I've gotten much better with MooTools over the past years so I thought I'd go back and update the class to be better, faster...
By David WalshNovember 26, 2012
Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS
CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more. I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...

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