Shell – How to find out which program can open a given file

command linefile openingfilesshell

Let's say I have a file thesis.pdf or picture.jpg

Is there a command which returns a program to open this file with?

I am aware of the command file, but it just returns the correct type of the file (I know that this is not specified by its extension in Linux) and not a program.

I am expecting something like:

$ program 'picture.jpg' 
gimp, gwenview, eog

Best Answer

mimeopen -a 'picture.jpg'

This is what you need

It will give you output like this

Please choose an application

    1) Shotwell Viewer  (shotwell-viewer)
    2) Firefox Web Browser  (firefox)
    3) Image Viewer  (eog)

Related Solutions

Bash – Opening a file with program in background from shell

Sometimes, when you start a program, it prints out some message. If you start it in background, the program may lock up until you bring it back to the foreground so that it can display its message. The solution is to redirect stdout and stderr so that the program can continue running in the background. One way to do this is:

evince myfile.pdf >~/evince.errs 2>&1 &

The above creates a file in your home directory with whatever message evince wanted to display.

If you are convinced that evince's messages are unimportant, you can discard them without creating a file:

evince myfile.pdf >/dev/null 2>&1 &

After running either of the above commands, the shell should produce a message like [1] 1234 and then a shell prompt should appear. As Graeme suggests, if the shell prompt does not appear, try pressing enter again.

How to find/remove file associations for a certain program in KDE

KDE uses freedesktop.org's standard mimeapps.list files for associating MIME types (file types) to applications.

The lookup order for this file is as follows:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/$desktop-mimeapps.list

user overrides, desktop-specific (for advanced users)

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mimeapps.list

user overrides (recommended location for user configuration GUIs)

$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/$desktop-mimeapps.list

sysadmin and ISV overrides, desktop-specific

$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/mimeapps.list

sysadmin and ISV overrides

$XDG_DATA_HOME/applications/$desktop-mimeapps.list

for completeness, deprecated, desktop-specific

$XDG_DATA_HOME/applications/mimeapps.list

for compatibility, deprecated

$XDG_DATA_DIRS/applications/$desktop-mimeapps.list

distribution-provided defaults, desktop-specific

$XDG_DATA_DIRS/applications/mimeapps.list

distribution-provided defaults

In this table, $desktop is one of the names of the current desktop, lowercase (for instance, kde, gnome, xfce, etc.)

This is determined from taking the ascii-lowercase form of a component the environment variable $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP, which is a colon-separated list of names that the current desktop is known as.

Note that:

$XDG_DATA_HOME defines the base directory relative to which user specific data files should be stored. If $XDG_DATA_HOME is either not set or empty, a default equal to $HOME/.local/share should be used.

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME defines the base directory relative to which user specific configuration files should be stored. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is either not set or empty, a default equal to $HOME/.config should be used.

These are plaintext, ini-style files that can be searched for a program of interest.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – Opening a file with program in background from shell

How to find/remove file associations for a certain program in KDE

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