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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Resize an Image Using Canvas, Drag and Drop and the File API

    Recently I was asked to create a user interface that allows someone to upload an image to a server (among other things) so that it could be used in the various web sites my company provides to its clients. Normally this would be an easy task—create a...

  • By
    AJAX For Evil:  Spyjax with jQuery

    Last year I wrote a popular post titled AJAX For Evil: Spyjax when I described a technique called "Spyjax": Spyjax, as I know it, is taking information from the user's computer for your own use — specifically their browsing habits. By using CSS and JavaScript, I...

Discussion

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