I have recently upgraded from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04. In the previous version, I could open Nautilus from the command line and continue to use the command line afterwards; it didn't block.
In Ubuntu 18.04 however, when I enter the command "nautilus", it blocks the terminal and I can't enter any commands until that Nautilus window is closed.
Previously I'd put this in my .bash_aliases:
alias nautilus='nautilus 2>/dev/null'
to deal with all the rubbish Nautilus likes to output to stderr.
I'm now using this as a workaround for the terminal blocking issue:
nautilus() {
{ xdg-open "${@:-$PWD}" &>/dev/null & disown; } 2>/dev/null
}
This seems to work fine and using xdg-open means it is more portable to other desktops (works on Raspbian anyway!).
But I'd like to know why Nautilus blocks now when it previously didn't.