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FedKad
Asked: 2022-02-05 00:50:29 +0800 CST

Creating a hyperlink from command line output on a terminal

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The command hostnamectl, when executed with no argument, will dump a bunch of information to the terminal. One of that is the Operating System line as shown in the sample output below:

$ hostnamectl  
 Static hostname: xxxxxx
       Icon name: computer-laptop
         Chassis: laptop
      Machine ID: e8..43
         Boot ID: 7b..2a
Operating System: Ubuntu 21.10
          Kernel: Linux 5.13.0-28-generic
    Architecture: x86-64
 Hardware Vendor: XXXXXX
  Hardware Model: XXXXXX

However, the output "Ubuntu 21.10" is underlined like a hyperlink and when you Ctrl+click, it will open a web browser with the following link address: https://ubuntu.com/.

How is this accomplished? What are the terminal commands (escape sequences?) that I need to output from a text based program or script to create such a hyperlink on the terminal?

command-line

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This information was not present in Ask Ubuntu, but I found the answer in another site: https://gist.github.com/egmontkob/eb114294efbcd5adb1944c9f3cb5feda

    The escape sequence to create the above link is:

    printf '\e]8;;https://ubuntu.com/\e\\Ubuntu 21.10\e]8;;\e\\\n'

    The general format is:

    The hyperlink open sequence starts with

    • the \e]8 escape sequence (ESC, ], and 8),
    • the params,
    • the target URI, and
    • the closing \e\ escape sequence (ESC and \)

    where params is optional: \e]8;params;URI\e\\

    Then comes the content that will be painted as hyperlink.

    The hyperlink is closed with the same escape sequence, omitting params and the URI, but keeping the separators: \e]8;;\e\\

    As a bonus to this answer, I suggest you use the following alias in your ~/.bash_aliases file:

    alias ll="LC_COLLATE=C ls --hyperlink=auto --group-directories-first --color=auto -alF"

    Here, the --hyperlink argument will direct the ls command to automatically create hyperlinks for file names on terminal output, so that when they are Ctrl+clicked they will open in Nautilus or the associated application.
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