<p>I've found the "open" command in Mac OS X very handy in the command line. From "man open":</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>The <code>open</code> command opens a file (or a directory or URL), just as if you had
      double-clicked the file's icon. If no application name is specified, the
      default application as determined via LaunchServices is used to open the
      specified files.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>That is, if I want to open a PDF file with the default PDF viewer (happens to be Preview), I only need to do:</p>

<pre><code>open my.pdf
</code></pre>

<p>In Linux, however, to open a PDF file from the command line, I had to dig around to find the default PDF viewer is, for instance, "evince" (who'd have guessed??), and then</p>

<pre><code>evince my.pdf
</code></pre>

<p>So, is there a simple equivalent of the 'open' command in the Linux command line?</p>

<p>Thanks!</p>

You could try
```
xdg-open
```
, most Linux distros have it. It will open default associated app for your file.
FYI
https://portland.freedesktop.org/doc/xdg-open.html