"Open" in Mac OS X Terminal

I find myself doing most of my file operations from the terminal in linux or Mac OS X - it's just fast. One of the differences from the typical linux install vs. Mac OS X's terminal, however, is the opening of programs. Under linux once can simply type the name of the program to open - "xfcedesktop" for instance, and start it up. Starting up a GUI-based program under the Mac OS X terminal, however, requires navigating into that application's *.app folder, navigating through the Contents and MacOS folder before using a terminal shell command like "./TextEdit" to start the program.

Inelegant.

While goofing around with the documentation man-pages I stumbled upon the "open" command, however. Use it on a document or file at the terminal to cause the appropriate application to open the file. Great for opening Microsoft Office files, movies, programming files, etc. Now I just type "open somestupidpieceofdata.txt" and voila!