Terminal: Opening the current path in a window?

Question

Often times, I find myself navigating very deep into a directory and wanting to open the graphical window (nautilus) for various reasons. So the question is simple:

After doing,

cd sampledirectory   cd sampledirectory2  

How can I open this location in a GUI?

Answer 1

I assume Gnome with Nautilus:

nautilus . 

To open in the current directory.

Replace nautilus with whichever File Manager you use (Dolphin, etc).

Answer 2

The most portable way should be using freedesktop's xdg-utils xdg-open. For example

   $ xdg-open . 

this has the advantage of choosing from your desktop preferences the tool to open different file types, like for example

   $ xdg-open ~/Documents/mypresentation.odp 

or

   $ xdg-open ~/Pictures/mypic.png