Use Quick Look from the command line

Quick Look is a nice feature added in 10.5, I use it often for glancing at the content of various documents and it certainly beats launching an application. If you’re an avid command line user though, you may be browsing through a directories contents and wondering just what is that JPG or DOC file. Wonder no more, because you can easily use Quick Look from the command line:

From the command line, use the following syntax:

qlmanage -p filename.jpg

This will launch a Quick Look window with whatever file is specified as ‘filename.jpg’, the file type can be anything that Quick Look is compatible with (which seems to be just about everything).

The qlmanage command has other abilities, here is the full flag list, courtesy of qlmanage -h:


Usage: qlmanage [OPTIONS] path...
-h Display this help
-r Force reloading Generators list
-p Show a preview of the documents
-t Show thumbnails of the documents
-s size Size for the thumbnail
-f factor Scale factor for the thumbnail
-c contentTypeUTI Force the content type used for the documents
-g generator Force the generator to use


Note that you can have Quick Look launch in the background by using the following command, allowing you to continue using the Terminal as usual:

qlmanage -p filename.jpg &