161

It's the default image viewer for Ubuntu, and apparently it's called Eye of Gnome. I would like to be able to launch it from the command line, passing it a file name to open.

3
  • 5
    Thanks for asking and answering this question! I always forget the name of this program.
    – orlenko
    Jun 16, 2013 at 22:08
  • eog is so barebones it can't display animated GIFs. I use XnViewMP, which on the other hand is a bit slower. Jun 18, 2017 at 0:51
  • @DanDascalescu, I just tried it on ubuntu, and it worked fine on an animated GIF I created
    – Vass
    Feb 16, 2018 at 14:34

4 Answers 4

219

The command to use is eog (Eye of GNOME). And you call it like so:

eog filename
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  • 2
    I came here looking for eye of mate, which is the command eom filename hope that helps anyone else Oct 3, 2014 at 13:41
  • To open full screen eog -f filename Jan 11, 2023 at 12:20
40

Use xdg-open:

xdg-open filename

which opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application.


Explanation

As long as you use Gnome and eog is your default image viewer, you can use gnome-open:

gnome-open filename

If you want an alternative that is independent of the desktop environment, use xdg-open which is bash wrapper around environment-specific commands.

For now, xdg-open supports:

  1. Xfce (exo-open "$1"),
  2. Gnome (gvfs-open "$1", gnome-open "$1" with fallback to generic open),
  3. KDE (kde-open "$1" with fallback to kfmclient exec "$1"),
  4. Mate (gvfs-open "$1", mate-open $1),
  5. LXDE (pcmanfm $1 with fallback to generic open),
  6. Enlightenment (enlightenment_open $1),
  7. Cinnamon (open_gnome3 $1, which is gvfs-open "$1" with fallback to generic open),
  8. Cygwin (cygstart "$1"),
  9. Darwin (open "$1").

and tries its luck with other desktop environments (called generics). $1 is your image filename.


Usage

xdg-open filename

If you want to figure out how xdg-open works, you can read bash source code:

$ locate xdg-open
/usr/bin/xdg-open
/usr/share/man/man1/xdg-open.1.gz
$ less /usr/bin/xdg-open

Edit

See also similar answer for different question on unix.stackexchange.com.

2

For Fedora you can use shotwell filename.

0

I opened cat.jpg. Then I typed

ps x | grep cat.jpg

eog was being used to open my file

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