OSX: using CLI version of VLC

The command open bla.avi -a vlc works because OS X is using its Launch Services database to open the application VLC. This doesn't have anything to do with a command line binary of the same name, which isn't installed by default.

The binary you search for is in the VLC.app package, so you can type that into a terminal:

/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I rc

This will open the interactive command line VLC. Or, execute the following in order to have the above line registered as an alias to vlc:

echo "alias vlc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I rc'" >> ~/.bash_profile

Once you've added this, you need to restart your Terminal. Now type vlc and you'll get to the command line.

If you don't like the interactive interface or would like to use VLC with other options, you need to edit your ~/.bash_profile accordingly, e.g. through open -e ~/.bash_profile.

OS X applications don't usually install any program executables outside their application bundle. As you don't usually interact with them from the command line, they're not put into any folder on your PATH.

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If you installed VLC to /Applications, the actual executable is /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC.

/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -hwill show some help, and /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --intf ncurses will launch the ncurses UI.

To access vlc from the command line, you can create a local symbolic link as below:

mkdir ~/bin
ln -vs /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC ~/bin/vlc

To have this command available for all users, you may want to link it into /usr/local/bin instead.

Make sure that your ~/bin (or /usr/local/bin) is in your environmental PATH variable, in other words that your ~/.profile file contains something like:

# set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi

Above code is default behaviour on Linux.