How to View Recently Opened Media Files – Filemanager Guide

filemanager

In windows we have an option to view recently opened media files as my recent documents, I was wondering does there exists something like that in Ubuntu?

via terminal or via GUI?

Best Answer

By default all kind of activities are being recorded in Ubuntu. For me the Unity Dash (Super) always is a convenient place to find recently accessed files, applications, or media:

Default screen showing recent applications, files, and Downloads
Music screen showing recent music files

The search can be further refined with filters as seen on the right side of the Dash window.
Similarly we can search for applications only, documents only, or videos from the bottom menu.

To disable this feature, make sure it is enabled, or use different settings look for privacy settings:

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Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to join text files

Use cat with output redirection. Syntax: cat file [file] [[file] ...] > joined-file.

Example with just two files (you can have many more):

$ echo "some text in a file" > file1
$ echo "another file with some text" > file2
$ cat file1 file2 > mergedfiles
$ cat mergedfiles
some text in a file
another file with some text

In case you have "many documents", make use of shell globbing (patterns):

cat input-files-dir/* > joined-file

This will join all files in that directory to the current directory (preventing it to match the output file itself). It is totally independent to the use of cat and output redirection - it's just Bash providing all the files as arguments to cat.

File types

It will just glue (join) files together as you would do with paper and tape. It does not care about the actual file format being capable of handling this. It will work for text files, but not for PDFs, ODTs, etc. Well, it will glue them together, but it's not a valid PDF/ODT anymore.

Order of joining

As phoibos pointed out the shell globbing will result in alphabetical order of file names. This is how Bash and shell globbing works.

Addendum about `input file is output file` error

When the pattern of the input files matches the very same file as being output, this will cause an error. It's a safety feature. Example: cat *.txt > out.txt run the second time will cause this.

What you can do about it:

Choose a more specific pattern to match the actual input files, not matching the output name. Example: input files pattern *.txt with output file output.out will not collide.
Work in different directories. In the example above I've used a separate input-files-dir directory to place all files in, and output to the current working directory. This makes it impossible to get this error.