Ubuntu – Increase or View all Stored History in Gedit

You can find both recent-used.xbel and the totem folder in the following locations;

• your home folder
• .local/share folder

If you delete the recent-used.xbel file and the totem folder, all of the history of your general applications and totem will be deleted.

There are a lot of places where things get logged, and it will be very diffucult to be exhaustive, depending on what applications you use. That said, here are the main places I can think of:

• most system logs go into /var/log
• firefox stores your history, cookies, etc... in ~/.mozilla/firefox This can be purged from Firefox (shift+ctrl+suppr)
• zeitgeist is an history daemon, that populates the dash recent history. It can be purged from the privacy settings
• terminal command history is saved on a per-user basis in ~/.bash_history Deleting this file will remove this history.
• gnome applications (gedit, nautilus, etc...) store recently used files in ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel This file can be deleted if needed.

These are the main places I can think of, but any application can log things in various places... so it really depends on what logs you want to remove.

As mentionned by MrVaykadji, BleachBit is a GPL software that automates such cleansing task, and let you delete "log files" for a wide variety of known softwares. You can also easily add new cleaners with simple xml files. Might be what you are (ware) looking for!