til/mac/reveal-location-of-file-in-finder-app.md

Reveal Location Of File In Finder.app

In the terminal I have the path to an image file. I want to open Finder.app to the location of that image file so that I can drag and drop it into a file upload area in the browser.

Instead of opening a Finder.app window and navigating directory by directory to the location, I can use the open command. Using open directly with the image file will open the image in Preview.app. I want to reveal the directory that the image file is in within Finder.app. Reveal is the keyword and the -R flag does just that.

Here is an example of this that I actually ran when uploading a screenshot that went into this blogmark post:

$ open -R /Users/lastword/images/tiobe-index-graph-march-2026.png

See man open for more details.