qlmanage

Terminal Tip: Use Quick Look from the Leopard command line

by 

Erica Sadun

11.05.2007

TUAW reader Shaun Haber sent us a link to his personal blog with a great post about using Leopard's Quick Look from the command line, which is wonderfully handy for anyone who spends a chunk of their day in Terminal. The qlmanage utility gives you direct access to many Quick Look functions; of specific interest is the -p flag. This option displays the Quick Look generated preview for any file. So if you tell it to qlmanage -p foo.png, the image immediately pops up in a Quick Look pane. Even better, Quick Look supports slide shows. So if you cd into a folder of images and run qlmanage -p *.jpg, you'll be rewarded with a full-on presentation of your pictures. Other qlmanage flags of interest include -h (displays a help message) -t (thumbnail generation) and -f (a zoom factor to display with). The downside of qlmanage is that it's full of NSLog-style messages. Haber recommends you pipe the output into /dev/null as follows: qlmanage -p *.jpg >& /dev/null.