Command Line – How to Open a PDF File from Terminal

command linepdf

I used to work on the Mac terminal before and I used:

open file2open.pdf

and the PDF file would be opened on preview or whatever my default viewer was. When I use it in the terminal in Ubuntu I get this error message:

Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console

Best Answer

Most desktop environments (generic)

xdg-open file2open.xxx

GNOME (generic)

until Xenial (16.04):
```
gvfs-open file2open.xxx
```
starting with Artful (17.10):
```
gio open file2open.xxx
```

(xxx = some file extension). With this command the default app for xxx will be invoked (for example evince if you want to open PDF).

Application-specific

Using Evince, GNOME’s default document viewer:
```
evince file2open.pdf
```
Using Okular, KDE’s default document viwer:
```
okular file2open.pdf
```

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to copy from a pdf to another pdf in ubuntu/linux

uPDF is an editor tool to write and paint to an existing pdf file. uPdf can insert pages of another pdf, insert new pages, remove and extract pages, rotate pages, paste a text or an image in the existing pdf, and much more.

You can install it in Ubuntu using ppa. For the moment, as I checked on https://launchpad.net/~atareao/+archive/updf, the uPDF ppa supports only Ubuntu 12.10 and 12.04. To install it, open a terminal and run next commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/updf
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gir1.2-rsvg-2.0 updf

If you use KDE you may also need to install the following dependency:

sudo apt-get install-0.1 gir1.2-appindicator3

More info: Install uPDF (effective pdf editor) in Ubuntu 12.04 /12.10

Another tool for editing pdf files and that can be found in Ubuntu Software Center is Master PDF Editor - a complete solution for view, print and edit PDF and XPS files.

Ubuntu – Open file using custom command: how to specify the file in cmd line

Found blog entries about the same problem for Foxit reader and for PDF-XChange Viewer. None of them worked for me. So I edited them and got one tailored for my case:

#!/bin/bash  
Filename="z:${1//\//\\}"
wine "C:\Program Files\Tracker Software\PDF Viewer\PDFXCview.exe" $Filename

Save this bash script and open pdf using this script. Now double click pdf files will open them using PDF-XChange Viewer.