0

I want to open multiple files with xdg-open with the following codes

me@host:~/Downloads$ find . -type f -iregex "./[^.]*"
./3ed090f2dde306e5e9f7200f1022a2c3
./ebd9863a73a5ef22344550a650d169a1
./edbdb765d87586fda75c4287a1e9ea1e
./d9e39bfe0a907ffb580a975d8c8719d2
./2b9cc942c04a8063bd8d4d8fd98814d9
./f5938dd24367ffaf766ef99928660786
./a51accbbf14c8a05cb82caa7d8bec0c6
./0820fb50b412f8e40f63b3bea12e9fb5
./53ef22110569d46b445a1e908a7ae88f
./61ee21f83a33b91674926daf70c34947

Try to open them 

me@host:~/Downloads$ find . -type f -iregex "./[^.]*" | xargs xdg-open 
xdg-open: unexpected argument './ebd9863a73a5ef22344550a650d169a1'
Try 'xdg-open --help' for more information.
me@host:~/Downloads$ find . -type f -iregex "./[^.]*" -print0| xargs -0  xdg-open 
xdg-open: unexpected argument './ebd9863a73a5ef22344550a650d169a1'
Try 'xdg-open --help' for more information.

What's the problem with my usage of xdg-open?

Alice
  • 1,360
  • 2
  • 13
  • 28

1 Answers1

0

Your problem is that xdg-open does not accept more than one argument, meaning that you can open only one file with it. This seems to be by design, as there are different underlying commands for opening files in different distros, and some of them accept only one argument.

If you are designing distribution-specific script, then you might want to try to find out what command xdg-open invokes. In Ubuntu MATE 16.04 it is gvfs-open, which in turn accepts multiple arguments. I found out this by feeding malformed filepath to xdg-open, as I (yet again) tried to open two files with it. Malformation I used was simply just two files with their paths, separated by comma, no spaces. This was accepted by xdg-open, but gvfs-open complained in return, exposing itself.

If you are designing distribution-independent script, then you may want to look for a solution from here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/356650/how-to-open-multiple-files-with-the-default-program-from-terminal/

F-3000
  • 935
  • 13
  • 13