Standard way to open a folder window in linux?

Question

I want to open a folder window, in the appropriate file manager, from within a cross-platform (windows/mac/linux) Python application.

On OSX, I can open a window in the finder with

os.system('open "%s"' % foldername)

and on Windows with

os.startfile(foldername)

What about unix/linux? Is there a standard way to do this or do I have to special case gnome/kde/etc and manually run the appropriate application (nautilus/konqueror/etc)?

This looks like something that could be specified by the freedesktop.org folks (a python module, similar to webbrowser, would also be nice!).

Answer 1

os.system('xdg-open "%s"' % foldername)

xdg-open can be used for files/urls also