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
    Conquering Impostor Syndrome

    Two years ago I documented my struggles with Imposter Syndrome and the response was immense.  I received messages of support and commiseration from new web developers, veteran engineers, and even persons of all experience levels in other professions.  I've even caught myself reading the post...

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

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