Linux equivalent of the Mac OS X "open" command
The equivalent you are looking for is xdg-open
, which can be used in the same way as OS X's open
command. For example:
xdg-open ~/Documents/Chubby_Bubbies.odt
However, this is really hard to type quickly and accurately. Instead, you should make an alias to xdg-open, which makes the process much quicker.
Of course, you can alias it to open
to make it match OS X (you can pick anything you want), but personally, I use the right square bracket (]
) for my shortcut for speed reasons. To use this, add the following to your .bashrc
file:
alias ']'='xdg-open'
Then, to open any resource, use it like any of these examples:
] www.google.com
] file.txt
] ~/Pictures
] ssh://myserver.local/home/jeremy
Also this lets you open a file browser (e.g. Nautilus) in the current directory:
] .
From experience I have found that one-letter aliases work best for the above shortcut. After all, the goal is efficiency. And you can go back and make the same alias on OS X — I leave that as an exercise to the reader. :-)
You could try xdg-open
, most Linux distros have it. It will open default associated app for your file.
FYI https://portland.freedesktop.org/doc/xdg-open.html
I just sorted this out myself so thought I would write down how I did it, which is specifically relevant to what Suan asked. These steps allow you just type "open " and not your terminal covered in messages you don't need:
Create a script called open
in ~/bin
, the content is just:
xdg-open "$1" &> /dev/null &
Save and close the script, then type "source .profile" (or .bash_profile if relevant). Thats it so typing "open Music" will open your music folder in the nautilus GUI and shouldn't enter anything onto your terminal.