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Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

I recognize this is the most trivial example cited, but on a Mac, you can also use the `open` command to open an URL:

    open "http://example.com"

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Some Linux distros offer a similar (though far less memorably named) "xdg-open".

It doesn't do any of the other really handy things the MacOS "open" command can do, like "open -f" slurping stdin into a fresh instance of your default text editor.

Recent distros have `open` as a symlink to `xdg-open` instead of the old `openvt`.

I believe that’ll be deprecated by `gio open` soon.

AIUI xdg-open is the standard tool which then forwards to the (equivalent of the?) desktop-specific tools. For KDE it's `kioclient exec`.

I wouldn't be surprised the GNOME people try to break this standard tool too.

This is correct. Unfortunately, xdg-tools is a set of almost forgotten scripts that need some more eyes and collaboration to polish. I've seen many problems there. Nobody is actively maintaining it, but a couple developers could get the ball rolling. (I'm interested)

On Windows, you can do this from the run dialogue!

[WIN]+R -> https://google.com

also, open . opens your current directory in Finder

That’s not what httpx does.

httpx was not referenced in the original article.

Was this maybe in reference to my top-level comment? If so, I just used httpx as an example of a module most people would have installed.

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