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Nathan Osman
Asked: 2011-01-04 13:31:28 +0800 CST

Command to open a URL

  • 772

Is there a command I can use in Bash that will open a specific URL in the default browser?

command-line

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    There's a command that knows about your default browser:

    xdg-open http://google.com

    This will also work for every other type of URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), like images - which will automatically open with eog, openoffice documents, and so on, and also on filesystem paths (xdg-open /tmp/foobar.png).

    There is also

    xdg-email [email protected]

    and

    xdg-mime query default text/html

    To find out what application is going to be used.

    You can set your preffered application by going to System → Preferences → Preferred Applications:

    alt text

    These utilities are part of the freedesktop.org specification, so you can use them in your applications - and it's going to work on all of the desktops that adhere to the spec.

    • 69

  2. You can use xdg-open like so:

    xdg-open http://askubuntu.com/

    From the XDG-OPEN man page:

    xdg-open opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application. If a URL is provided the URL will be opened in the user's preferred web browser.

    • 11

  3. If you don't necessarily want to use the default browser, you can call any browser program directly and give the URL as argument, for example:

    chromium-browser https://youtube.com

    or 

    firefox https://youtube.com
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  4. gnome-open works as well as xdg-open but neither knows what to do with naked domain.

    So gnome-open http://askubuntu.com works but not gnome-open askubuntu.com.

    Here is a small function to make it easier to type and accept the stripped down domain name.

    function go { gnome-open http://$1 ; }

    Paste the above in your command line, hit enter and try it out. If you like it you can save it to your .bash_aliases or .bashrc file, then source ~/.bash_aliases (assuming it is in your home directory) and it will be persistent for that session and all new sessions.

    So now we just type go askubuntu.com and wallah!

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  5. Using x-www-browser URL will open the browser or a new tab at the given URL

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