Apple - Create a Terminal command to open file with Chrome

You can use the open command with the -a flag to open a file or location in Chrome:

open -a "Google Chrome" index.html

This also works with URLs, i.e. open -a "Google Chrome" http://www.apple.com.


I found this way more beautiful:

  1. Edit ~/.bash_profile file and add the following line alias chrome="open -a 'Google Chrome'"
  2. Save and close the file.
  3. Either run source ~/.bash_profile or open a new window in Terminal.

You can now open the file, file.html, by running: chrome file.html on the command line.


When using this from a script or some automation tool I prefer to alias to the complete binary so I have access to all the command line options, (like --version ...)

alias chrome="/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome"
chrome --version
chrome -open index.html

Then if you want to have this alias permanently you can add it to your .bash_profile manually or using this little snippet:

echo "alias chrome=\"/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome"\" >> ~/.bash_profile