If you ever wonder why MacOS users have a nice little command-line application called “open” to open an arbitrary file with the correct application, and you – a proud Linux user – don’t, you have come to the right place :)

If you use GNOME (KDE sucks :P) you probably have a nice little command-line application called “gnome-open”.

It does exactly what you are thinking. It find the mime-type of the file you pass as a parameter and use the GNOME configured application for that mime-type.

Since I am lazy (and probably you too) don’t forget to put this on your .bashrc (or equivalent):

alias open="gnome-open" 
alias o="gnome-open" 

Have fun with your console!

^{(Probably KDE (and others) have a similar application)}