How do I launch the default web browser in Perl on any operating system?

Question

I want to open a URL, such as http://www.example.com/, at the end of a Perl script. I don't want to access it with WWW::Mechanize but actually show the web page to the user in a graphical web browser.

There are ways to do this in Mac (open URL) and Windows, but I want a solution that works on any operating system, not just one.

Answer 1

The second hit on "open url" at search.cpan brings up Browser::Open:

use Browser::Open qw( open_browser );

my $url = 'http://www.google.com/';
open_browser($url);

If your OS isn't supported, send a patch or a bug report.

Answer 2

You can use $^O variable to identify a platform and use different commands for each OS.

For example:

sub open_default_browser {
  my $url = shift;
  my $platform = $^O;
  my $cmd;
  if    ($platform eq 'darwin')  { $cmd = "open \"$url\"";          } # Mac OS X
  elsif ($platform eq 'linux')   { $cmd = "x-www-browser \"$url\""; } # Linux
  elsif ($platform eq 'MSWin32') { $cmd = "start $url";             } # Win95..Win7
  if (defined $cmd) {
    system($cmd);
  } else {
    die "Can't locate default browser";
  }
}

open_default_browser("http://www.example.com/");

Answer 3

If installing CPAN module Browser::Open is not an option or not desired, Taras' answer provides a good alternative, but can be improved in the following ways:

• make the function work robustly on Windows with URLs that contain shell metacharacters such as & and ^.
• on Windows, add support for the MSYS, Git Bash, and Cygwin Unix-emulation environments
• add support for additional operating systems that also have the xdg-open utility, namely all OSs that are freedesktop.org-compatible, i.e., use GUIs that are X Window-based, which includes non-Linux platforms such as PC-BSD (FreeBSD-based) and OpenSolaris.

# SYNOPSIS
#   openurl <url>
# DESCRIPTION
#   Opens the specified URL in the system's default browser.
# COMPATIBILITY
#   OSX, Windows (including MSYS, Git Bash, and Cygwin), as well as Freedesktop-compliant
#   OSs, which includes many Linux distros (e.g., Ubuntu), PC-BSD, OpenSolaris...
sub openurl {
  my $url = shift;
  my $platform = $^O;
  my $cmd;
  if    ($platform eq 'darwin')  { $cmd = "open \"$url\"";       }  # OS X
  elsif ($platform eq 'MSWin32' or $platform eq 'msys') { $cmd = "start \"\" \"$url\""; } # Windows native or MSYS / Git Bash
  elsif ($platform eq 'cygwin')  { $cmd = "cmd.exe /c start \"\" \"$url \""; } # Cygwin; !! Note the required trailing space.
  else { $cmd = "xdg-open \"$url\""; }  # assume a Freedesktop-compliant OS, which includes many Linux distros, PC-BSD, OpenSolaris, ...
  if (system($cmd) != 0) {
    die "Cannot locate or failed to open default browser; please open '$url' manually.";
  }
}

^{Cygwin caveat: Bizarrely, the only way to protect the URL passed to cmd.exe from interpretation of chars. such as & and ^ is to append a trailing space. This works in all but one edge case, which, however, should be rare in the real world: if the URL contains something like %FOO% and an environment variable named FOO exists, %FOO% is inadvertently expanded.}