I've been looking for the answer to this one for a long time, but I can't find it at all. Basically, on mac os, you can run the following command: $ open filename.txt

When you run the above command, it'll actually execute the file and open it in its default application and not within the terminal. If I use that same command for a directory, it'll actually open the directory. But I haven't found any command like it on Linux. When I look online they always show me the cat command, or nano, etc.

Does a command like that exist in Linux?

To associate a file type to a program you need to set its mime type.

Else you could create a script to open it in a particular program.

(For multiple types, you could use 'if then elseif' statements, for instance).

xdg-open should be able to do this for you.

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