The open
shell
command lets you open
Finder windows and launch GUI
applications. To open a
directory in the Finder, use
open,
followed by the name of the directory. For
example, to open a Finder window containing the current directory,
type:
open .
To open your Public folder
(~
/Public
):
open ~/Public
To open the /Applications
directory:
open /Applications
To open an
application, you need only
its name. For example, you can open Xcode
(/Developer/Applications
) with this command:
open -a Xcode
Tip
You are not required to enter the path for the application, only its name—even if it is a Classic application. The only time you are required to enter the path is if you have two different versions of an application with similar names on your system.
You can also supply a filename argument with the
-a
option, which
would launch the application and open the specified file with that
application. You can use this option to open a file with something
other than the application with which it’s
associated. For example, to open an XML file in Xcode instead of the
default XML editor, the Property List Editor, you could use the
following command:
open -a Xcode data.xml
To open multiple files, you can use wildcards:
open *.c
To force a file to be opened with TextEdit, use
-e
:
open -e *.c
The -e
switch will only open files in the
TextEdit application; it cannot be used to open a file in another
text editor, such as BBEdit (however, you can use the
command-line bbedit
application to open a file
with BBEdit). If you want to use TextEdit on a file that is owned by
an administrator (or root
),
open
-e
will not work.
You’ll need to specify the full executable path, as
in:
$ sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit filename
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