xdg-open - Man Page

opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application

Examples (TL;DR)

Open the current directory in the default file explorer: xdg-open .
Open a URL in the default browser: xdg-open https://example.com
Open an image in the default image viewer: xdg-open path/to/image
Open a PDF in the default PDF viewer: xdg-open path/to/pdf
Display help: xdg-open --help

Synopsis

xdg-open {file | URL}

xdg-open {--help | --manual | --version}

xdg-open opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application. If a URL is provided the URL will be opened in the user's preferred web browser. If a file is provided the file will be opened in the preferred application for files of that type. xdg-open supports file, ftp, http and https URLs.

xdg-open is for use inside a desktop session only. It is not recommended to use xdg-open as root.

As xdg-open can not handle arguments that begin with a “-” it is recommended to pass filepaths in one of the following ways:

Pass absolute paths, i.e. by using realpath as a preprocessor.
Prefix known relative filepaths with a “./”. For example using sed -E 's|^[^/]|./\0|'.
Pass a file URL.

Options

--help: Show command synopsis.
--manual: Show this manual page.
--version: Show the xdg-utils version information.

Exit Codes

An exit code of 0 indicates success while a non-zero exit code indicates failure. The following failure codes can be returned:

Error in command line syntax.
One of the files passed on the command line did not exist.
A required tool could not be found.
The action failed.

In case of success the process launched from the .desktop file will not be forked off and therefore may result in xdg-open running for a very long time. This behaviour intentionally differs from most desktop specific openers to allow terminal based applications to run using the same terminal xdg-open was called from.

Reporting Issues

Please keep in mind xdg-open inherits most of the flaws of its configuration and the underlying opener.

In case the command xdg-mime query default "$(xdg-mime query filetype path/to/troublesome_file)" names the program responsible for any unexpected behaviour you can fix that by setting a different handler. (If the program is broken let the developers know)

Also see the security note on xdg-mime(1) for the default subcommand.

If a flaw is reproducible using the desktop specific opener (and isn't a configuration issue): Please report to whoever is responsible for that first (reporting to xdg-utils is better than not reporting at all, but since the xdg-utils are maintained in very little spare time a fix will take much longer)

In case an issue specific to xdg-open please report it to https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-utils/-/issues .