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
    Responsive and Infinitely Scalable JS Animations

    Back in late 2012 it was not easy to find open source projects using requestAnimationFrame() - this is the hook that allows Javascript code to synchronize with a web browser's native paint loop. Animations using this method can run at 60 fps and deliver fantastic...

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Fixing sIFR Printing with CSS and MooTools

    While I'm not a huge sIFR advocate I can understand its allure. A customer recently asked us to implement sIFR on their website but I ran into a problem: the sIFR headings wouldn't print because they were Flash objects. Here's how to fix...

  • By
    Geolocation API

    One interesting aspect of web development is geolocation; where is your user viewing your website from? You can base your language locale on that data or show certain products in your store based on the user's location. Let's examine how you can...

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!