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Chief author, Open Source enthusiast, Web Programmer, and UI/UX Designer.
Saturday, February 25, 2012 at 18:23

Every Operating System (without no exception for Ubuntu) usually create user activity log that log in at the time, some log that are often found are recent used document, the presence of recently used document log sometimes makes people uncomfortable, they afraid if their friend know what they just did using their computer, it's about privacy.

You can perform many various ways to make Ubuntu does not showing any recently used document, here the easiest and fastest way to do it without installing extra application :

The list of recent used document is save in <home directory> /.local/share/recently-used.xbel, the fastest way to make you untraceable is delete the recently-used.xbel, do as follow :

  • rm ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
Create an empty file to replace the file that you just delete above :
  • touch ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
Make sure that recently-used.xbel can't be modified (immutable), some reference about immutable file can be read in here :
  • sudo chattr +i ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
Chattr is equal to attrib in windows, System or user can't edit, remove, or modify recently-used.xbel. To revoke last action and make the file editable, do as follow :
  • sudo chattr -i ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
Before
After
Clear Recent Used Document using Application
Another ways that you can do to clear recent used document is using a program, there are many program that help you to manage user privacy and log in Ubuntu  (we will discuss it later), Some  application that may help you to manage user activity log and privacy control are : 
  1. BleachBit.
  2. Activity Journal.
  3. Ubuntu Tweak.
  4. Activity Log Manager.
Hopefully this will help :)