Running nautilus from terminal causes gnome-session to start too many nautilus processes

[Ibrahim M. Ghazal]

Binary package hint: nautilus

When killing the existing nautilus process, then immediately running nautilus from the terminal before gnome-session gets to spawn another one, i.e.:
$ nautilus -q && nautilus
gnome-session spawns an infinite number of nautilus processes, filling the task bar with many "Starting File Manager" entries.

The symptoms of this bug is similar to Bug #325973, but it has a different cause.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: nautilus 1:2.32.0-0ubuntu1.3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-22.33-generic 2.6.35.4
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-22-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Mar 24 21:44:58 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release i386 (20101007)
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: nautilus

[ppareit (ppareit)]

Same problem here, when in the shell executing:

  nautilus -q && nautilus --no-desktop

nautilus will spawn indefinitely. This can be stopped with executing 'nautilus -q'. The previous command is important, as it is used to debug extensions for nautilus, the command will allow to capture the output of nautilus, assuming it works as expected.

To work around this problem, edit '/usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop', change X-GNOME-AutoRestart to false and add the line 'AutostartCondition=GNOME /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop'.

[Ibrahim M. Ghazal (imgx64)]

Pieter,

That's exactly my use case, I'm working on a nautilus extension and trying to get the stack traces it's printing.

Thanks for the workaround, it's very helpful.

[Ravi Teja (punkzebra)]

I have confirmed the bug. I got the following errors in terminal after executing
"nautilus -q && nautilus

Initializing nautilus-gdu extension

(nautilus:2030): GConf-CRITICAL **: gconf_value_free: assertion `value != NULL' failed

(nautilus:2030): GConf-CRITICAL **: gconf_value_free: assertion `value != NULL' failed"

[ppareit (ppareit)]

This still happens. Now on 11.04.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The issue seems resolved in newer versions