Thursday, January 19, 2012

Clearing history in Ubuntu (watched movies, opened documents, etc)

Watched a dirty movie? Or are you just unhappy with everyone seeing what you do with your PC?
Let's see, how we can fix that in Ubuntu (11.10).

Luckily, nearly all questionable history (movies watched, documents opened, ...) are recorded in the same file named recently-used.xbel .
Do the following commands to delete the file containing history, and then recreate an empty file with same name:

sudo rm -rf ~/.local/share/recentyl-used.xbel

sudo touch ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

Your history is now clear, but any new actions will be noted in the file, so further modification is needed to stop that.

This will disable history logging:
sudo chattr +i ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

This will enable historry logging (if you change your mind later on):
sudo chattr -i ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

I'll post about clearing Terminal history tomorrow.-

6 comments:

  1. I haven't used Ubuntu in awhile, but this will come in handy someday.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Concise instructions, nice job

    ReplyDelete
  3. I was wondering how for awhile. thanks

    ReplyDelete
  4. I probably won't remember that if I need it, hopefully I'll remember where to find out!

    ReplyDelete