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How do I write a simple shell script (say script.sh), so that I can pass a URL as an argument while executing?
I want a browser to start with the page opened on that URL. I want to write the command in the script to open a browser and open the URL given in argument.
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xdg-open - opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application 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.
For opening a URL in the browser through the terminal, CentOS 7 users can use gio open command. For example, if you want to open google.com then gio open https://www.google.com will open google.com URL in the browser.
You don't need to write a script for that. There're some tools that you can use depending on your OS:
xdg-open is available in most Linux distributions. It opens a file or URL in the user's preferred browser (configurable with xdg-settings).
xdg-open https://stackoverflow.com open opens files and URLs in the default or specified application.
open https://stackoverflow.com open -a Firefox https://stackoverflow.com You can use the start command at the command prompt to open an URL in the default (or specified) browser.
start https://stackoverflow.com start firefox https://stackoverflow.com The builtin webbrowser Python module works on many platforms.
python3 -m webbrowser https://stackoverflow.com
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Method 1
Suppose your browser is Firefox and your script urlopener is
#!/bin/bash firefox "$1" Run it like
./urlopener "https://google.com" Sidenote
Replace firefox with your browser's executable file name.
Method 2
As [ @sato-katsura ] mentioned in the comment, in *nixes you can use an application called xdg-open. For example,
xdg-open https://google.com The manual for xdg-open says
xdg-open - opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application 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.
As [ this ] answer points out you could change your preferred browser using say:
xdg-settings set default-web-browser firefox.desktop or
xdg-settings set default-web-browser chromium-browser.desktop If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
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