How to Open Google Chrome from Terminal on Mac

Command line users may encounter situations where they’d like to open the Google Chrome web browser directly from the Terminal on the Mac.

Opening GUI applications from the command line is easy on MacOS, and the command syntax to do so has been the same since the beginning of Mac OS X, so regardless of what system software version you are using you’ll find this trick to work.

Opening Google Chrome from the Command Line on Mac

The syntax to open Google Chrome from the terminal is as follows:

open -a "Google Chrome.app"

Hit return as usual to execute the command. No special permissions are required, since Chrome is launching from the universally accessible /Applications directory

This will launch the Google Chrome web browser in the MacOS graphical user interface (GUI), it does not run Chrome in the Terminal as a command line browser (which does not exist as Chrome anyway). If you want a command line text-based web browser, try using Lynx or similar, which is obviously not a GUI application, nor is it Chrome.

You can open other applications and documents through the command line by using the open command as well, but obviously here we are focusing on the Chrome web browser.