Terminal’s `open` command

January 11th, 2009 in Howto

OS X has a powerful set of commands available in its Terminal tool, including a full set of BSD commands (which are mostly compatible with their Gnu/Linux counterparts). One of its indispensable commands is open, which opens files and directories as if you had clicked on them in the Finder, especially handy if you navigate from the command line extensively like I do.

A few examples:

# Open a Finder window from the current directory
open .

# Open all .doc files using the default .doc OS X application
open *.doc

# Open `a.pdf` using the default PDF viewer
open a.pdf

# Open a Wikipedia page from the command line
open http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF