A better way of always dumping Gedit out of Terminal?

Question

I use terminal alot, so it was frustrating to me to deal with gedit's inconsistent behavior between having a window open and when one was not. I ended up searching around, and finding a way of getting around this. I've created this bash script, and aliased it to gedit, and I've slowly been expanding it.

Basically the script does these things:

• Checks to see if arguments exist, if not, it opens gedit with no document
• If arguments do exist, it iterates over each and opens them all.

This creates consistent behavior where gedit won't stick in terminal dumping log data.

#!/bin/bash

if [[ -z $1 ]]; then
    /usr/bin/gedit &
else
    for var in "$@"
    do
        /usr/bin/gedit "$var" &
    done
fi

My question is if there are any glaring errors here, or if there is a cleaner, faster way of doing this? I'm specifically interested in the loop, as I feel there should be an easier way of passing list data as a single string. The reason I didn't just use $* for that, is when I tried the fact that it's wrapped in quotes caused it to open a single document with all parameters listed as the file name.

I added the quotes for a reason that I should have documented, but I currently do not remember.

Answer 1

If you just want to make gedit operate silently and in the background, I would create a function (save in ~/.bashrc)

gedit() { command gedit "$@" &>/dev/null & }

Also, Accessing bash command line args $@ vs $*

Answer 2

I accepted the answer here due to the linked post. I had originally been using $* as I stated above, and was unaware of the differences between $* and $@. As it turns out, in this instance I needed $@ because $* passes the list of arguments as a single string with all special characters quoted, including any spacing between arguments, while $@ passes the arguments as a single string, but with only the arguments quoted, so spacing between arguments is treated as spacing for the command.

Given that, I have converted the above script over to the following:

#!/bin/bash

if [[ -z $1 ]]; then
        /usr/bin/gedit &
else
        /usr/bin/gedit "$@" &
fi