How to Open an App from Anywhere on Mac Command Line

By  on  

Many engineers like myself live in the command line, and perform actions from command line that most others would click an icon for. I've always found opening apps from command line on Macs painful. You need to references the Applications directory, add .app to the name, etc. I just want to open apps by name.

To open an app from any directory by its simple name, you can use the -a argument to open:

open -a  Cyberduck

# Works regardless of case as well
open -a CyBeRdUcK

I love -a for a command like open. Being able to open any app by name is exactly what I want!

Recent Features

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

  • By
    JavaScript Promise API

    While synchronous code is easier to follow and debug, async is generally better for performance and flexibility. Why "hold up the show" when you can trigger numerous requests at once and then handle them when each is ready?  Promises are becoming a big part of the JavaScript world...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Columns

    One major gripe that we've always had about CSS is that creating layouts seems to be more difficult than it should be. We have, of course, adapted and mastered the techniques for creating layouts, but there's no shaking the feeling that there should be a...

  • By
    MooTools, mediaboxAdvanced, and Mexico

    The lightbox is probably one of my favorite parts of the Web 2.0 revolution. No more having to open new windows (which can bog down your computer quite a bit) to see a larger image, video, etc. Instead, the item loads right into the...

Discussion

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