Ubuntu – How to open a directory/folder and a URL through Terminal

command line

I can navigate my files quite fast through terminal. Faster than double clicking… open… look, double click… etc.

How do I open a directory in the Ubuntu GUI? For example:

cd projects
{some cmd} client_project

Then voila, it opens in the Ubuntu GUI as if i navigated manually?

Also, how can I open a URL in my default browser via terminal. It'd be awesome to go: F12

open http://google.com

And Chrome opens it up.

Best Answer

To Open Directory:

To open a Folder from terminal type the following,

nautilus /path/to/that/folder

xdg-open /path/to/the/folder

i.e

nautilus /home/karthick/Music
xdg-open /home/karthick/Music

Simply typing nautilus will take you file browser,
```
nautilus
```

To Open URL:

You can type any one of the following in terminal,

xdg-open http://google.com       
google-chrome http://google.com                 
opera http://google.com
firefox http://google.com

If you want to open two URL's at the same time then leave some space after the first URL and type the second,
```
firefox www.google.com www.gmail.com
```

Note:

Linux is case-sensitive, so type the file name correctly.
You can also add an alias to short the command,for example if you need openurl instead of x-www-browser you should edit the .bashrc file
gedit ~/.bashrc
In the bottom of the file add the following lines
```
alias openurl=x-www-browser
```
Save and close the file.
Now you can open URLs by typing,
```
openurl http://google.com
```

Modern Answer

gtk-launch <app-name> - where <app-name> is the file name of the .desktop file, with or without the .desktop extension.

See another answer on this thread for more details. I got this info from that answer.

Deprecated shell tools answer

Written a long time ago - see the comments below this answer as to why this approach won't work for many desktop files.

The command that is run is contained inside the desktop file, preceded by Exec= so you could extract and run that by:

$(grep '^Exec' filename.desktop | tail -1 | sed 's/^Exec=//' | sed 's/%.//' \
| sed 's/^"//g' | sed 's/" *$//g') &

To break that down

grep  '^Exec' filename.desktop    # - finds the line which starts with Exec
| tail -1                         # - only use the last line, in case there are 
                                  #   multiple
| sed 's/^Exec=//'                # - removes the Exec from the start of the line
| sed 's/%.//'                    # - removes any arguments - %u, %f etc
| sed 's/^"//g' | sed 's/" *$//g' # - removes " around command (if present)
$(...)                            # - means run the result of the command run 
                                  #   here
&                                 # - at the end means run it in the background

You could put this in a file, say ~/bin/deskopen with the contents

#!/bin/sh
$(grep '^Exec' $1 | tail -1 | sed 's/^Exec=//' | sed 's/%.//' \
| sed 's/^"//g' | sed 's/" *$//g') &

Then make it executable

chmod +x ~/bin/deskopen

And then you could do, e.g.

deskopen /usr/share/applications/ubuntu-about.desktop

The arguments (%u, %F etc) are detailed here. None of them are relevant for launching at the command line.

Ubuntu – How to open “Trash” through terminal

The trash folder should be located under:

/home/your_username/.local/share/Trash

So you should be able to access it via:

cd ~/.local/share/Trash

The folder might not exist unless you delete something from the filesystem. In this case you would run into an error (saying that the folder does not exist).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Running a .desktop file in the terminal

Modern Answer

Deprecated shell tools answer

Ubuntu – How to open “Trash” through terminal

Related Question