How to: Start any application from the terminal

Starting any application from the terminal can ease your workflows a lot. I’ve gotten used to being able to open files from the shell, when I’m working on a project. I navigate to the project folder and start editing, either markdown files for documentation or source code.

Usually I’d type gvim file.md and watch the gVim window open.

Not all applications come with the ability to start and edit a file directly from the command line, the good thing is: It’s easy to make them do it anyways. In my case I wanted to open files with uberwriter from the terminal.

find path of a running application

$ ps aux | grep application_name
$ ps aux | grep uberwriter
geronimo  4383  0.6  1.3 536748 47108 ?        Sl   21:08   0:00 /usr/bin/python3 /opt/extras.ubuntu.com/uberwriter/bin/uberwriter

This will show you how this application is run, in this example it’s located in /opt, which explains why it doesn’t show up as a command in the terminal right away.

Start UberWriter from the terminal

To achieve that with a program that doesn’t build a launch script in /usr/bin/ or /usr/something/bin/, we can just roll our own script. If we were to launch UberWriter from the shell I technically could type the following every time:

python3 /opt/extras.ubuntu.com/uberwriter/bin/uberwriter.py filename &

Since I’m lazy and just want to write uberwriter filename, I will just add the path to my custom scripts to my ~/.bashrc like so:

# include /home/user/scripts for user scripts
export PATH=~/scripts/:$PATH

Then in my home directory, inside the scripts folder, I created a file called uberwriter with the following content:

python3 /opt/extras.ubuntu.com/uberwriter/bin/uberwriter.py $1 &

After you’ve created such a file, remember to make it executable through a line like chmod +x uberwriter.

The $1 represents the file name I want to open and the & frees up the terminal, so I can make use of it for other purposes.

Use it for anything