Open data from shell in any graphical application
April 15, 2008 (edited since original posting)
A sweet tip for opening data from the Mac shell environment in any graphical application from MacOSXHints.
Previous to this hint, the only way I was using “open” was to open files from the command line with their related graphical app. For instance, opening a .rtf file in TextEdit:
open mytext.rtf
Or simply piping source code to TextMate via a curl download:
curl http://dfbills.com | mate
Now, I can can load data and files into any application by adding the -f and -a flags:
curl ‘http://example.com/encodingerror.html’ | open -a ‘Hex Fiend’ -f
curl ‘http://example.com/example.html’ | open -a ‘TextMate’ -f
curl ‘http://example.com/example.png’ | open -a ‘Preview’ -f
curl ‘http://example.com/example.m4v’ | open -a ‘QuickTime Player’ -f
posted in: Mac Tips Unix