<div dir="ltr">Today I was about to open a pdf from the terminal and realized that I forgot what my document viewer was. I tried something that I assumed wouldn't work but seemed fairly logical and obvious - the 'open' command. Now, of course, that did not work, but after a search I was somewhat surprised to see that there are commands like gnome-open and xdg-open. Instead of making users google this, shouldn't we just have a universal 'open' command on all freedesktop environments? If xdg-open is desktop agnostic, then I assume it could be installed with a link/script named 'open' until a better (Non-GUI-dependent? More coordinated?) solution is found. Apparently, 'open' is a command in OSX, and when this user asks what the Linux equivalent is, they are told to alias xdg-open to get similar functionality: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/264395/linux-equivalent-of-the-mac-os-x-open-command">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/264395/linux-equivalent-of-the-mac-os-x-open-command</a> So maybe we should have a script that calls xdg-open $1 &> /dev/null Imagine the following conversation: new user: What command do i use to find files? *nix veteran: Oh, that's easy. Use xzzy-locate. new user: W-why not...just locate? That makes sense. *nix veteran: 'Cause we're a bunch of nerds. new user: oh. When I got the document open I saw that my viewer was evince. No wonder I couldn't remember. Robert Qualls.</div>