Open Windows internet shortcut (*.url) files in firefox

1 
 $ grep -i url='*' file.url | cut -b 5- | xargs firefox

Sept. 12, 2014, 12:06 a.m. — tsjswimmer

Explanation

Extract urls from a *.url file and open in Firefox. (Note that *.url files in Windows are basically just text files, so they can be parsed with a few commands.)

  • grep extracts lines starting with url=
  • The -i flag is to ignore case
  • cut extracts the range of characters from the 5th until the end of lines
  • xargs calls Firefox with arguments taken from the output of the pipeline

Related one-liners

0

Open Windows internet shortcut (*.url) files in firefox 

 $ firefox $(grep -i ^url='*' file.url | cut -b 5-)

Sept. 11, 2014, 10:03 a.m. — tsjswimmer

Explanation

Extract urls from a *.url file and open in Firefox. (Note that *.url files in Windows are basically just text files, so they can be parsed with a few commands.)

  • grep extracts lines starting with url=
  • The -i flag is to ignore case
  • cut extracts the range of characters from the 5th until the end of lines
  • The output of $(...) will be used as command line parameters for Firefox

Limitations

This only works with URLs that don't contain special characters that would be interpreted by the shell, such as spaces and others.