Quick Look is one of the more compelling feature in macOS . enter in OS X 10.5 , you no longer do you have to open an diligence just to glance at a file — a press of the Space Bar in the Finder is all it takes .
But you may be surprised to rule that you may use Quick Look when working in Terminal , a decidedly non - GUI program . This feature can be utilitarian if you ’re act upon in Terminal and require to be certain a certain file is what you think it is before you do something to it . Instead of switching out to the Finder , or using theopencommand , you could Quick Look the file straight from Terminal .
How ? The key fruit is a Unix program , qlmanage , stick in in OS X 10.5 and built into macOS . This program was really designed for programmers writing Quick Look generator , but we can apply it for our own purpose . To see the Quick Look prevue for any filing cabinet , just typeqlmanage -p somefile , wheresomefileis the full name of a file in the current directory .
As an model , here ’s how you could use Quick Look from Terminal to try out a PNG file . The two commands below first change to the Mac ’s User Pictures / Fun pamphlet in the Library folder , then necessitate the system to display the Quick Look prevue for one of the range :
After you see quite a bit of textbook go flow by in Terminal , a Quick Look window will open up , displaying the Gingerbread Man user picture . It ’s important to observe that this isnotthe Finder ’s Quick Look window — in fact , if you switch out to the Finder with the Terminal ’s Quick Look window still show , you ’ll see that you could spread novel Quick Look windows in the Finder . To close up the Terminal ’s Quick Look windowpane , you could either use the black eye and click the preview window ’s close box , or ( much unsubdivided ) just campaign Command - C to terminate theqlmanageprogram .
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