In a bash script, I need to launch the user web browser. There seems to be many ways of doing this:
$BROWSER
xdg-open
gnome-open
on GNOME
www-browser
x-www-browser
- ...
Is there a more-standard-than-the-others way to do this that would work on most platforms, or should I just go with something like this:
#/usr/bin/env bash
if [ -n $BROWSER ]; then
$BROWSER 'http://wwww.google.com'
elif which xdg-open > /dev/null; then
xdg-open 'http://wwww.google.com'
elif which gnome-open > /dev/null; then
gnome-open 'http://wwww.google.com'
# elif bla bla bla...
else
echo "Could not detect the web browser to use."
fi
xdg-open
is standardized and should be available in most distributions.
Otherwise:
eval
is evil, don't use it.
- Quote your variables.
- Use the correct test operators in the correct way.
Here is an example:
#!/bin/bash
if which xdg-open > /dev/null
then
xdg-open URL
elif which gnome-open > /dev/null
then
gnome-open URL
fi
Maybe this version is slightly better (still untested):
#!/bin/bash
URL=$1
[[ -x $BROWSER ]] && exec "$BROWSER" "$URL"
path=$(which xdg-open || which gnome-open) && exec "$path" "$URL"
echo "Can't find browser"
python -mwebbrowser http://example.com
works on many platforms
OSX:
$ open -a /Applications/Safari.app http://www.google.com
or
$ open -a /Applications/Firefox.app http://www.google.com
or simply...
$ open some_url
You could use the following:
x-www-browser
It won't run the user's but rather the system's default X browser.
See: this thread.
This may not apply exactly to what you want to do, but there is a really easy way to create and launch a server using the http-server
npm package.
Once installed (just npm install http-server -g
) you can put
http-server -o
in your bash script and it will launch a server from the current directory and open a browser to that page.