how do you open a PDF at a specific page from the command line? (OSX or Linux)

Question

I want to open a PDF document at a specific page from the command line, sort of like vim +n [file]. Is there any way to do that in OSX, with any PDF reader program?

Answer 1

The following method works with Skim, an open-source replacement for Preview.app. First, download Skim, then save the following code on a text file and name it "gotopage.scpt":

on run argv
    tell application "Skim"
        activate
        open (item 1 of argv)

        tell document 1
            go to page index (item 2 of argv)
        end tell

    end tell
end run

You can now tell Skim to open a certain PDF and go to page 99 by writing this on the terminal:

osascript gotopage.scpt "/full/path/to/doc/mydoc.pdf" 99

You might want to wrap the above line into an sh script of your own. Also note that the path to the PDF must be absolute, otherwise Skim won't find the file.