dolphin --select file:///foo/bar.txt And I don't know what other desktop environments use to do the same task. Currently xdg-open doesn't support this. Should we just add an --in-file-manager option so that you can do xdg-open --in-file-manager file:///blah.txt What do you think? [1] https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdebase/kde-baseapps/repository/revisions/master/entry/dolphin/src/main.cpp#L73 Federico