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
    LightFace:  Facebook Lightbox for MooTools

    One of the web components I've always loved has been Facebook's modal dialog.  This "lightbox" isn't like others:  no dark overlay, no obnoxious animating to size, and it doesn't try to do "too much."  With Facebook's dialog in mind, I've created LightFace:  a Facebook lightbox...

  • By
    Welcome to My New Office

    My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Filters

    CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...

  • By
    Save Web Form Content Using Control + S

    We've all used word processing applications like Microsoft Word and if there's one thing they've taught you it's that you need to save every few seconds in anticipation of the inevitable crash. WordPress has mimicked this functionality within their WYSIWYG editor and I use it...

Discussion

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