Shell script to open a URL

How do I write a simple shell script (say script.sh), so that I can pass a URL as an argument while executing?

I want a browser to start with the page opened on that URL. I want to write the command in the script to open a browser and open the URL given in argument.

Solution 1:

You don't need to write a script for that. There're some tools that you can use depending on your OS:

Linux

xdg-open is available in most Linux distributions. It opens a file or URL in the user's preferred browser (configurable with xdg-settings).

xdg-open https://stackoverflow.com

macOS

open opens files and URLs in the default or specified application.

open https://stackoverflow.com
open -a Firefox https://stackoverflow.com

Windows

You can use the start command at the command prompt to open an URL in the default (or specified) browser.

start https://stackoverflow.com
start firefox https://stackoverflow.com

Cross-platform

The builtin webbrowser Python module works on many platforms.

python3 -m webbrowser https://stackoverflow.com

Solution 2:

Method 1

Suppose your browser is Firefox and your script urlopener is

#!/bin/bash
firefox "$1"

Run it like

./urlopener "https://google.com"

Sidenote

Replace firefox with your browser's executable file name.

Method 2

As [ @sato-katsura ] mentioned in the comment, in *nixes you can use an application called xdg-open. For example,

xdg-open https://google.com

The manual for xdg-open says

xdg-open - opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application xdg-open opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application. If a URL is provided the URL will be opened in the user's preferred web browser.
If a file is provided the file will be opened in the preferred application for files of that type. xdg-open supports file, ftp, http and https URLs.

As [ this ] answer points out you could change your preferred browser using say:

xdg-settings set default-web-browser firefox.desktop

or

xdg-settings set default-web-browser chromium-browser.desktop

Solution 3:

For Windows,

You can just write start filename_or_URL

start https://www.google.com

It will open the URL in a default browser. If you want to specify the browser you can write:

start chrome https://www.google.com
start firefox https://www.google.com
start iexplore https://www.google.com

Note: The browser name above can be obtained from the exe file found in program files (sample: C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe) if you wish to open multiple URLs.

start chrome "www.google.com" "www.bing.com"

It was tested with .sh (shellscript file) and .bat files.