Gnome-open, open files and URLs from terminal easily

Written on January 7th, 2010 at 18:12 pm by shredder12

I mostly work on the command line. So, whenever I want an application to open a file I mostly do it running a command. But this requires you to know the name of the application which I can hardly remember, bad memory . But gnome guys have a solution for people like us. Its called gnome-open.

Gnome-open actually makes use of the gnome file handlers to decide what kind of application should be used to open a particular kind of file. Suppose you want to open some file, say "file.ext" and you are not sure of the application that handles the file format "ext" then you can use gnome-open to ease your job.

[shredder12]$ gnome-open  file.ext

3 Comments

jorge (not verified)
January 8th, 2010 03:20 am
xdg-open is probably what you want since it works crossdesktop. And it's also shorter to type. :D
Ken (not verified)
June 18th, 2010 01:19 pm
see also: alias go='gnome-open'
Andrew (not verified)
June 30th, 2010 03:50 am
Great, but how do you associate a new suffix with a particular program, or change the program with which a given suffix is associated?

Post new comment

  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <img> <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <blockquote> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <p> <br>
  • You may post code using <code>...</code> (generic) or <?php ... ?> (highlighted PHP) tags.
  • Image links with 'rel="lightbox"' in the <a> tag will appear in a Lightbox when clicked on.

  • Search Engines will index and follow ONLY links to allowed domains.

More information about formatting options

Type the characters you see in this picture. (verify using audio)
Type the characters you see in the picture above; if you can't read them, submit the form and a new image will be generated. Not case sensitive.