At 1:31 PM -0800 12/10/2002, Matt Morse wrote: >>also i'm interesed in opening a browser with a valid internet address >>as argument but i can't find out the syntax for mac os x - can anyone >>give a hand with that? > >You can use the open command (see the man page for details): > > open -a Internet\ Explorer http://www.cnn.com > >or, if you don't want to specify a particular app: > > open http://www.cnn.com > >...and the site will appear in the user's preferred browser.
This is a 10.2 addition - the 10.1 version of open(1) didn't support URL access. And the first form appears to be irrelevant. If the file part of the command looks like a URL, the -a argument is ignored - it'll only pass the URL along to the default handler for that URL (in my case for http, OmniWeb) and leave the -a designated app unlaunched. Switching around to different browser defaults, IE didn't seem to work properly the first time, but after quitting and relaunching, it worked acceptably well. I wonder if issues with IE and /usr/bin/open were addressed in later Jaguar builds. With 10.2.2, it is working on my machine. Just another set of data points. -Charles Euonymic Solutions http://euonymic.com