Opening Finder windows from the Terminal
While working on the command line in Terminal, I occasionally need to open up a new Finder window so that I can take a look at something in the Finder. When this happens, the open command provides a useful shortcut to do so.
To open a new Finder window from the current directory in the Terminal, you would run the following command:
open .
For example, if you have navigated to the Pictures directory in your home folder, running this command would cause the Pictures directory to open in a new Finder window.
If you want to open a Finder window using Terminal for an alternate directory, you would run the following command:
open /path/to/directory
For example, if you wanted to access the XProtect.meta.plist file stored in the /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources directory, you could run this command to open the /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources directory in a new Finder window:
open /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources
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Der Flounder 
You can also use “find” to open a Findoer window with a specific application highlighted. This is my usual “presentation” step at the end of postflight for my installers, rather than adding the icon to the dock (as I hate messing with people’s docks).
For example, if you wanted to open the Applications folder, with “Mail” selected (and thus front and center of the Finder window) the code would be:
find “/Applications” -name “Mail.app” -maxdepth 1 -exec open -R {} \;
You can also command-click on the Terminal title bar, just as you can with other MacOS documents, to reveal the enclosing folder. (That would help you in your first example but not your second.)
Also note that you can save time the other way: drop a file or folder into a Terminal window, and you’ll get the path to the item (properly escaped for the shell). And in Mountain Lion, you can also hold down the command key when you do that and you’ll cd straight to that dir (for a folder) or to the enclosing dir (for a file).