Opening Things from the Command Line
Why should you have to pop on up to the GUI to open applications, files, directories, and URLs when it’s just as easy from the command line?
The open
command
launches applications and opens files, directories, and URLs from the
command line just as if you’d double-clicked its
associated icon in the Finder.
Launch applications by supplying open
with their
path. Here we launch
Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word:
%open /Applications/Internet\ Explorer.app
... %open /Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ X/Microsoft\ Word
Tip
You’ll notice that Internet Explorer ends in
.app
while Microsoft Word does not.
Cocoa applications are postfixed
with a .app
extension. Carbon or Classic apps
have no special extension.
Opening a directory is no different; to bring your Music folder up in the Finder, type:
% open ~/Music
Just as the Finder mysteriously figures out which application is
associated with any particular files, shortcuts, or URLs, so too does
open
determine which application, if any, to use.
The underlying magic involved comes
in two flavors: type/creator codes and file extensions [Hack #6]
, from the Mac OS 9 and Unix worlds,
respectively. The Macintosh operating system maintains a database of
type/creator codes and their associated applications, quietly looking
up the application best suited to deal with a file you double-click
and launching it for you. The Unix world doesn’t
know such codes and relies instead on file extensions, like
.txt ...
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