open a pdf file via terminal
 

Can I open a pdf file via terminal. Suppose I want to open a book named 18177059-wrox-beginning-linux-programming-ed2.pdf via terminal. How can I do that?

Hi,

If you are talking about starting a terminal from your window manager you can use something like:

acroread filename or xpdf filename

I'm not aware of a program that can read/show pdf files from runlevel 3 (= no window manager).

Hope this helps.

What is the reason for wanting to do this?

You can start any program from the terminal, but a pdf file normally needs a graphical environment to display properly.

Perhaps there is a program that just shows the raw text---but it might be pretty hard to read without any formatting.

Most desktops have a command that's equivalent to double-clicking a file, e.g. on gnome:

has the same effect as opening myfile by double-clicking. xfce has a similar one that I forget (I map the open command to just 'o' on each system I'm on so I forget quite quickly) and I would be very surprised if there wasn't one for KDE.

To convert a pdf to raw ascii I suppose you could use:

gnome-open, eh? Glad I read this. :)