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Friday, May 8, 2009

Open a file from the command line using its default application

Windows users are familiar with the concept of file association. When you double click a file (say, cisco.doc), Windows examines the file name extension (doc), and opens the file using the default program associated with that extension(Office).

Linux users can open files in a similar way in their X Window graphical user interface. But, if you want to open the file from the command-line, you need to type out at least the program name, oowriter, or do you?
$ oowriter cisco.doc


If GNOME is your window manager, use the gnome-open command as follow:
$ gnome-open cisco.doc


oowriter is automatically started up to open cisco.doc, if oowriter is indeed associated with the .doc file name extension.

For KDE users, use kde-open instead.

Alternatively, you can run the window-manager-neutral program called xdg-open. xdg-open is part of the xdg-utils package.

$ xdg-open cisco.doc

13 comments:

  1. AnonymousMay 10, 2009 at 9:55 AM

    Another (better?) solution is to use ZSH aliases. Just add a line like "alias -s doc='soffice'" to your .zshrc and you will be able to just type the name of the file:

    $ cisco.doc

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJuly 19, 2009 at 11:25 PM

    thanks Peter, your blog helped me in my search.
    I didn't know how to open the stuff from command line.

    ReplyDelete
  3. BenOctober 29, 2009 at 9:36 PM

    Thank you. Just what I was looking for.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousNovember 9, 2009 at 12:07 PM

    Nice. Good post.

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousDecember 29, 2009 at 4:00 AM

    nice post
    im searching exactly for this

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousApril 14, 2011 at 8:51 AM

    Thanks, that was very helpful!

    ReplyDelete
  7. sanjeevMay 9, 2011 at 10:43 PM

    Thanks for the Info.!! :)

    ReplyDelete
  8. AnonymousJune 11, 2011 at 8:51 PM

    Thanks for the info, very helpful!

    ReplyDelete
  9. terryJuly 4, 2011 at 2:18 AM

    Thank you! This comment was really helpful

    ReplyDelete
  10. NazilaNovember 2, 2011 at 8:32 PM

    Thank you ! It was really helpful

    ReplyDelete
  11. AnonymousNovember 10, 2011 at 9:21 AM

    Thanks. I've been dying for a way to do this since I discovered something similar when stuck on MacOS.

    ReplyDelete
  12. CulipFebruary 8, 2012 at 12:55 PM

    Excellent! That's what I have wanted to do! I just added

    alias o='kde-open'

    in my .bashrc ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  13. K.D.GJanuary 24, 2013 at 6:06 PM

    thank you @Culop where to put alias on linux

    on MacOSX (Tiger+) it is "open filename.doc"

    ReplyDelete