Ubuntu 7.04 – Disable Recent Documents

Posted by Sam Lesher on August 4, 2007

There is not an obvious way to disable the Recent Documents menu under the Places menu if you don’t want to use that feature. Here is how I do it:

Open a terminal window and execute these two commands:

$ rm ~/.recently-used.xbel $ mkdir ~/.recently-used.xbel

Replacing that file with a directory seems to be the only way to keep it from being populated.

Posted in Ubuntu | Comments (7 )

Comment from Pest on November 27, 2007 @ 2:27 am

Thanks!@

Comment from Ananth on December 8, 2007 @ 6:36 am

Thanks, was searching a lot for this.

Comment from Annon on December 22, 2007 @ 11:19 pm

IT works.

Comment from G on February 17, 2008 @ 9:48 am

Another way is to soft link to /dev/null. This works in more cases, for example when the program expects to be able to write to the file. Try:

rm ~/.recently-used.xbel
ln -s /dev/null ~/.recently-used.xbel

Comment from Anonymous Coward on May 13, 2008 @ 1:09 pm

> ln -s /dev/null ~/.recently-used.xbel

Nope, does not work on 7.10, link gets replaced with a regular file as soon as some document is opened.