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
    5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About

    CSS and JavaScript:  the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release.  They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely.  We have our .js files and our .css, but...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create WordPress Page Templates with Custom Queries

    One of my main goals with the redesign was to make it easier for visitors to find the information that was most popular on my site. Not to my surprise, posts about MooTools, jQuery, and CSS were at the top of the list. What...

  • By
    Create Custom Events in MooTools 1.2

    Javascript has a number of native events like "mouseover," "mouseout", "click", and so on. What if you want to create your own events though? Creating events using MooTools is as easy as it gets. The MooTools JavaScript What's great about creating custom events in MooTools is...

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!