Question

I am creating an application in which it would be very easy for a user to actually be able to click on a link in the application, which opens up a specific folder in Finder (in Mac)/ Windows Explorer. This can happen on click event of a link or a button.

Is there a way I can open these native OS applications (for a specific folder) via Swing?

Answer 1

Use Runtime.getRuntime().exec("command here"); to execute a command in the system on which java is running.

For explorer.exe, you can simply pass the absolute path of the folder as an argument, e.g.

Explorer.exe "C:\Program Files\Adobe"

In Mac OS X, you can use the open command:

open /users/

you can find out how to detect which OS You’re on, and hence which code to run, here. For example, this will chek if you are on windows:

public static boolean isWindows() {

    String os = System.getProperty("os.name").toLowerCase();
    // windows
    return (os.indexOf("win") >= 0);

}