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
    Introducing MooTools Templated

    One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating: new Element Madness The first way to create UI-driven...

  • By
    7 Essential JavaScript Functions

    I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent.  Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Fx.Rotate: Animated Element Rotation with MooTools

    I was recently perusing the MooTools Forge and I saw a neat little plugin that allows for static element rotation: Fx.Rotate. Fx.Rotate is an extension of MooTools' native Fx class and rotates the element via CSS within each A-grade browser it...

  • By
    MooTools 1.2 Tooltips: Customize Your Tips

    I've never met a person that is "ehhhh" about XHTML/javascript tooltips; people seem to love them or hate them. I'm on the love side of things. Tooltips give you a bit more information about something than just the element itself (usually...

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!