I want to open html files from a shell script. I know that Ubuntu has a command x-www-browser that will open the default browser on the system. I also found via some Googling that the command is part of the debian system. I was wondering if the command is available on non debian based distros. If it isn't is there a standard way of opening an html file in the default browser on a linux OS via command line? Note that I'm using Bash.
If you are wanting to open an HTML file that is local (and maybe even remote, I'd have to check), you can use xdg-open. This is the rough equivalent to "double-clicking" on a file to open it, so it's not limited to html files. Since you want to always open in the user's default browser, this would be the same as if they just opened it themselves.
Of course, if they have their system set up to have HTML files open in a text editor (like I did for awhile), this would backfire. But that's pretty rare.
Quick update
I just checked and xdg-open http://google.com brought up Google in Firefox (my default browser). So it does work for non-local files.
You could use xdg-open.
Related
I'm using julia and gadfly to draw some plots on a remote server (connected through Putty) and the plots are supposed to open in my default server. They open in lynx, and so don't look like anything really. I'm presuming lynx is the default browser on my work server, and I was wondering whether there is any way to open them in chrome or firefox? I'm not the server administrator and have no permission to use all commands (ie sudo etc).
When trying to use xdg-utils I get an error saying "command not found" and I don't have any applications in my /usr/.local/applications nor could I find a mimeapps.list in the directory.
Is there anything I can do to open these plots in another internet browser instead of lynx? Thank you!
The order of preferences
Gadfly plots on Julia's display if it can (for example if you're using an interactive graphical notebook with Jupyter).
If there's no suitable way to render on the REPLDisplay, Gadfly will save the plot into a file, then trigger some platform-specific "open this file" logic.
Julia's own display
This is almost certainly the best option. If you run your Julia code in an environment that knows how to display your plots (such as an interactive graphical notebook with Jupyter), then there's nothing more to do.
If you must run your Julia code from a text prompt, you can use a text-based backend renderer, or deal with the fallback process.
xdg-open
Gadfly's fallback display code uses xdg-open to display plot files on Linux-based systems.
The xdg-open tool is part of a package called xdg-utils. The xdg-utils package contains several commands, but xdg-utils is not itself a command -- that's why trying to run "xdg-utils" fails with "command not found".
xdg-open has its own chain of opening things: it will try the opening procedures specific to GNOME, KDE, or whatever desktop environment you're using. It falls back to something called "perl-shared-mimeinfo".
Another tool in the xdg-utils package is xdg-mime, which can query the current file associations as well as change them. You need administrator privileges to change system-wide associations, but you don't need any special permissions to add your own per-user associations.
Since Gadfly is writing to a file then asking xdg-open to open the file, you'll need to handle the filetype (rather than "browser" or URL handler). It might look something like this for HTML files:
$ xdg-mime default mybrowser.desktop text/html
Which computer runs the browser?
Now, you mention that you're using SSH and PuTTY to connect to this server. PuTTY provides a text-based interface to your server -- even if the server had a graphical browser like Firefox installed on it, PuTTY couldn't display it. (You'd need something else on your computer that the server could use to draw the browser window.)
It would probably be more comfortable to use your computer's own browser.
So what do I do?
Launching a browser is a bit weird for a server computer anyway, and it can be fiddly to make it happen. So my recommendation would be either:
Skip PuTTY, display directly in a Jupyter notebook.
Save your output as HTML (or SVGJS) somewhere that your computer's browser can access it.
I usually use "TAB" button to help me do typing in linux or AIX command, for example, I have a file with file name is abcdefg.txt, so when I want to vi to this file, I just type vi ab then press the "TAB" button in my keyboard, then it will automatically help me search for abcdefg.txt (only have 1 file which is name start with ab).
However, when I ftp to the environment, I can not use "TAB" button, I need to fully type the whole file name. Please advise me how to do this in ftp environment.
Second problem, in ftp environment, when I list all the files in the directory, I saw a file which name is 123456789.txt, however, when I want to rename it like:
rename 123456789.txt 123456789a.txt
it prompt me 550 123456789.txt: A file or directory in the path name does not exist.
But I can rename the other files. I suspect this 123456789.txt file name got some space in some where, that's why I hit the error.
Most FTP programs, especially those which come with proprietary Unices like AIX or HP-UX don't offer readline support. Install a more powerful tool like ncftp to fix this.
To rename files with whitespace, you can try to quote the file name but again, this might fail with bare-bones FTP clients.
When just downloading the file, there is a simple workaround: Use your browser. Every browser supports the ftp:// protocol. The main problem here is security: You have to pass the password via the URL: ftp://user:password#host/ so the browser will put it into its history.
But since you use FTP, security isn't a concern anyway (FTP transmits the password as plain text over the wire, so everyone on the same network can see it).
Another option is mucommander, a cross platform file manager which supports a wide range of protocols and which handles spaces in file names correctly.
I am trying to open image files, pdf files and music files using Cygwin, a terminal that provides Linux functionality in Windows. So far I have not successfully executed a command that would accomplish what I want. I can only open text files at this moment using vim text editor.
Edit: Thanks for the comments. I am looking to open files using appropriate windows applications. Also, I do not know how I can figure out whether XServer is already installed and why would I need XServer to resolve my issue in the first place.
Use the cygstart utility, e.g.,
cygstart foo.bmp
will open up the image file in Paint.
It’s in the cygutils package, which I believe is installed by default. It has a man page that shows that you can use it to open URLs in your browser, among other things.
Guys im researching about WGET command in linux, (im very new to linux) and i found this statement which i dont understand
GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without X-Windows support, etc.
and what does
"without X-windows support means" too?
Also what i understand about wget is that it downloads something, but how come i can
wget http://google.com/
and see some weird text in the screen.
A little help here
Wget downloads content to a file. So the text you see in your terminal is just a job log.
Non interactive means that it doesn't prompt for any input while it works. You specify everything via command line parameters.
X (and related) handles GUI rendering. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System for details.
easier to think of what wget DOESN'T do. Your typical browser reads a URL from a GUI interface, and when you click on it, the browser generates & sends a file request to retrieve an HTML file. It then translates the (text based) html source file, sends further requests for content like images etc., and renders the whole thing to GUI as a webpage.
Wget just sends the request & dowloads the file. It can be controlled to recursively fetch links in the source file, so you could download the whole internet with a few keystrokes XD.
It's useful by itself for grabbing graphic & audio files without having to sit through a point & click session. You can also pipe the html source through a custom sed or perl filter to extract data. (like going to the city transit page & converting schedule info to a spreadsheet format)
On my webpage, I have placed a link to a local file (e.g. "text.docx" on my local HD). I would like to double click on this link, and have a third party software which is installed locally on my PC (e.g. Microsoft Word) open it.
I would like to be able to do this with Firefox and Google Chrome. Obviously, I am a newbie to web programming.. can somebody show me the way? I have looked around and had the impression that I need to write and add an extension, maybe?
Thanks for your time. Jakob
This is only possible if you know either the absolute path to the file or the relative path from whatever working directory your browser runs from. You the create a link with
href="file://relative/path/to/file/text.docx"
or
href="file:///absolute/path/to/file/text.docx"
and any modern browser will query the system database for the mimetype of the file depending on its extension, thus prompting to open the correct application.
EDIT
I inawarently introduced a unixism in the previous code: Distinction bewteen absolute and realtive paths as above works well on current *nix desktops, but in Windows an absolute path will most likely look like
href="file://C:/drive/absolute/path/to/test.docx"
Mind the 2 (not 3) slashes a the beginning, and the forward (not backward) slashes.
As far as I know, you can't link to local files from a website. If you upload it to where your files are, you could then be able to download it.
I was able to execute code locally, using Firefox, by adding an extension which used the XPCOM interface. One such extension was "commandrun", and may be found here: https://github.com/aabeling/commandrun .