How does one properly use the nautilus & command in a graphical SSH into debian 6.0.4?

Question

Last login: Wed Mar 21 20:10:33 2012 from astrolab17.astro.washington.edu 
1 td% nautilus &
[1] 9847 
2 td% Initializing nautilus-gdu extension

And then I quit nautilus.

The thing is, though, that putting the & operator at the end of nautilus, I'm supposed to be able to enter new commands after I close (or 'X' out of) the nautilus window. This happens with most other programs like Matlab. Except that this doesn't happen with Debian.

The distribution involved is Debian 6.0.4.

Answer 1

... & disown

Some programs require that you use & disown. Some programs will still put output to your terminal, which is hard to deal with, but you can try directing the output to /dev/null.

For example:

nautilus > /dev/null & disown

This will also prevent nautilus from closing if you close the terminal window.

... ; bash

Is the terminal closing immediately when you launch nautilus?

nautilus > /dev/null & disown ; bash

CTRL+C

Are you sure you cannot run additional programs? Try hitting CTRL+C to refresh your prompt.