Re: Opening a file from dired as OS would in Linux

[jpkotta <jpkotta@gmail.com>]

On May 29, 12:09 pm, David Vanderschel <D...@Austin.RR.com> wrote:
> I have this handy function in my .emacs for Emacs on Windows:
>
> ;; dired stuff to open files a la Windows from Howard Melman
> (defun dired-execute-file (&optional arg)
>   (interactive "P")
>   (mapcar #'(lambda (file)
>       (w32-shell-execute "open" (convert-standard-filename file)))
>           (dired-get-marked-files nil arg)))
>
> I am now switching over to Ubuntu, and I do not know how to say the equivalent
> of "(w32-shell-execute "open" ...".  But I would certainly like to be able to
> launch files from dired.  E.g., open this .PDF file in the viewer.  Maybe it is
> already there, but I have difficulty framing the question in an effective way
> for search.  Thanks for any pointers.

This pretty much depends on which desktop environment/file manager you
use.  Some shell commands to look at are xdg-open, kfmclient exec, and
gnome-open.