How to open a folder (with GUI) from terminal?
gnome-open
does not work for me on 12.04 but nautilus /path
to open does work.
example: nautilus /home/john/Downloads
.
If the question is how to open a file/folder, the answer is always xdg-open.
From man xdg-open:
xdg-open opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application. If a URL is provided the URL will be opened in the user's preferred web browser. If a file is provided the file will be opened in the preferred application for files of that type. xdg-open supports file, ftp, http and https URLs.
In this specific case the commmand
xdg-open folder
opens folder in your default file manager, be it Nautilus, Dolphin, Thunar or anything else.