Command line users may encounter situations where they want to open the Google Chrome web browser directly from the Mac terminal.
Opening GUI applications from the command line is easy on MacOS, and the command syntax has been the same since the beginning of Mac OS X, so regardless of your system software version, you’ll find this trick works.
Open Google Chrome from the command line on Mac
The syntax for opening Google Chrome from the terminal is as follows:
open -a "Google Chrome.app"
To execute the command, press return as usual. No special permissions are required because Chrome starts from the publicly available /Applications directory
This will launch the Google Chrome web browser in the MacOS graphical user interface (GUI), it will not launch Chrome in the terminal as a command line browser (which doesn’t exist as Chrome anyway). If you want a command-line text-based web browser, try using Lynx or similar, which is clearly not a GUI application, and neither is Chrome.
You can open other applications and documents through the command line using the open command, but obviously we’re focusing on the Chrome web browser here.