Ubuntu – Ctrl+C does not quit a running program in terminal

Gnome uses a Session Manager (gnome-session) to keep track of what it needs to do. It is responsible for bringing up the whole session, all subprocesses, restoring state and saving it when you log out.

GNOME provides tools to allow your application to run smoothly from session to session. Users can log out with running applications and have those applications fully restored when they log back in. – from the Gnome Documentation Library

Among other things, the session manager tries to keep it's instance of Nautilus running. Nautilus has to register with the session manager for that - which it does by default; naturally, there's a command-line option to disable it:

nautilus --sm-disable

You can kill a running Nautilus process for good by running:

killall -9 nautilus

If the commands are often used, they are recorded in the command history bash tracks in .bash_history.

Now the trick: You can reverse search this history to re-execute commands by pressing CTRL-r.

In inverse history search mode, bash shows, live, as you type, the most recent command in the history that start with your given input. Then press enter to accept and execute the proposed command. Keep pressing CTRL-R to cycle to older commands with the same prefix.

This is builtin in bash, no need for customizing scripts or install software :) It is one of the most useful features of bash, imho.