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I'd like to grep and open a file in just one terminal command.

Suppose I'm in this directory:

$ ls
1.txt   2.txt   3.txt   4.txt   5.txt

and I want to open 3.txt

I thought I could do ls | grep 3 | open

but it looks like open doesn't accept piped input. Is there any way to do this?

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2

Try open $(ls | grep 3). Depending on your specific needs, you can also skip the grep part and use open $(ls *3*) (or even open *3*) directly.

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  • What is the difference between open $(ls *3*) and just open *3*? – David Anderson Feb 4 '16 at 11:17
  • None in this case, good point :-). I assume that the OP had more complex patterns in mind. – nohillside♦ Feb 4 '16 at 12:27
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    Pro Tip: Always add a -- before the glob * when doing ls, rm, open and so on. And never create files named "-rf"... – Max Ried Feb 4 '16 at 13:13
  • Parsing ls to produce file name arguments is a bad idea. You can get undesirable results if the directory contains file names with spaces that match the pattern/glob. – fd0 Feb 4 '16 at 16:48
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Another option

find . -name "*3*" -exec open {} \;

Will run open on any file with 3 in it's name from the current directory down. The spaces and backslash matter in this case.

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