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How to Open a Website from Terminal

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Every once in a while I want to open a website from the terminal ... just because.  Maybe it's because it makes me feel just a bit more hardcore, you know, not clicking a GUI icon.  Anyways, opening a browser via the command line is dead simple:

open https://davidwalsh.name

That execution will open the URL in the system's default browser.  If your prefer a specific browser, you can so specify:

open -a "Google Chrome Canary" http://cnn.com

Open a URL from the command line -- you'll feel like a true pro.

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Discussion

  1. Geopelia

    Like i child…

  2. danny

    Since aliasing gitwww to open the current github repo’s home page, ive saved prob. 2 mins/day. Plus is saves my fingers a trip to the mouse!

    • Ollie

      could you share how you made the alias dynamic to access the current repo’s homepage?

  3. Fatih Kalifa

    I thought you’re gonna use lynx :))

  4. Fahad Billah

    open didnt work :(
    but start did :) in windows environment

  5. Ioannis Karavas

    Heh, you got me there! I thought you wrote an article about lynx :-) Thanks for sharing though, it’s especially useful when grabbing stuff using curl or wget…

  6. john gravois

    these days in zsh on OSX you need to wrap the url in quotes

    open 'https://davidwalsh.name/open-website-terminal'

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