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
    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...

  • By
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Drag. Drop. Lock.

    I've received dozens of emails about my Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Using MooTools article. The MooTools in my article contained a lot of conditional code to require correct dropping per the game and many people requested that I simplify the process and just...

  • By
    Event Delegation with MooTools

    Events play a huge role in JavaScript. I can't name one website I've created in the past two years that hasn't used JavaScript event handling on some level. Ask yourself: how often do I inject elements into the DOM and not add an...

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!