How do I launch the default web browser in Perl on any operating system?

Question

I want to open a URL, such as http://www.example.com/, at the end of a Perl script. I don\'t want to access it with WWW::Mechanize but actually show the web page to

Answer 1

You can use $^O variable to identify a platform and use different commands for each OS.

For example:

sub open_default_browser {
  my $url = shift;
  my $platform = $^O;
  my $cmd;
  if    ($platform eq 'darwin')  { $cmd = "open \"$url\"";          } # Mac OS X
  elsif ($platform eq 'linux')   { $cmd = "x-www-browser \"$url\""; } # Linux
  elsif ($platform eq 'MSWin32') { $cmd = "start $url";             } # Win95..Win7
  if (defined $cmd) {
    system($cmd);
  } else {
    die "Can't locate default browser";
  }
}

open_default_browser("http://www.example.com/");