Linux: command to open URL in default browser

Question

What command we have to execute (from Java, but that should not matter) on Linux (different common distributions) to open a given URL in the default browser?

Answer 1

I think using xdg-open http://example.com is probably the best choice.

In case they don't have it installed I suppose they might have just kde-open or gnome-open (both of which take a single file/url) or some other workaround such as looping over common browser executable names until you find one which can be executed(using which). If you want a full list of workarounds/fallbacks I suggest reading xdg-open(it's a shell script which calls out to kde-open/gnome-open/etc. or some other fallback).

But since xdg-open and xdg-mime(used for one of the fallbacks,) are shell scripts I'd recommend including them in your application and if calling which xdg-open fails add them to temporary PATH variable in your subprograms environment and call out to them. If xdg-open fails, I'd recommend throwing an Exception with an error message from what it output on stderr and catching the exception and printing/displaying the error message.

I would ignore the java awt Desktop solution as the bug seems to indicate they don't plan on supporting non-gnome desktops anytime soon.