As a Mac OS X switcher, I’ve wanted an equivalent to the Mac OS X Terminal open command and came across xdg-open which pretty much behaves the same way. That’s too much to type though so I added an alias in my .bashrc file:
alias 'o'='xdg-open'
You can use whatever alias you like as long as it doesn’t conflict with an existing command.
Restart or reload your Terminal and you be able to open a file or directory in X from the command line.
For example:
#open a file
$ o /path/to/text_file.txt
#open the current directory in Caja
$ o ./
Might save you some time and it’s useful for Mac switchers.
It will be very useful