Clean way to launch the web browser from shell script?

bash shell command-line standards standards-compliance
nicoulaj picture nicoulaj · Jun 26, 2010 · Viewed 96.2k times · Source

In a bash script, I need to launch the user web browser. There seems to be many ways of doing this:

  • $BROWSER
  • xdg-open
  • gnome-open on GNOME
  • www-browser
  • x-www-browser
  • ...

Is there a more-standard-than-the-others way to do this that would work on most platforms, or should I just go with something like this:

#/usr/bin/env bash

if [ -n $BROWSER ]; then
  $BROWSER 'http://wwww.google.com'
elif which xdg-open > /dev/null; then
  xdg-open 'http://wwww.google.com'
elif which gnome-open > /dev/null; then
  gnome-open 'http://wwww.google.com'
# elif bla bla bla...
else
  echo "Could not detect the web browser to use."
fi

Answer

jfs picture jfs · Jun 26, 2010 
python -mwebbrowser http://example.com

works on many platforms

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