Can I mark files as recently-used from the command line? GTK applications mark files as recently used by adding them to the XML in `~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel`, but I am frequently working with files from terminal-driven applications like latex, and these are not marked in the GTK list and hence not available from the "Recent" bookmark in GUI file browsers/pickers etc.. Is there a CLI command I can use to explicitly add files to the Recent list, for smoothing operations between the terminal and GUI sides of my Linux usage? Either an official way, or a fast & simple hack with the side-effect of writing to the `recently-used.xbel` file!

The following Python script will add all the files given as arguments to the recently-used list, using GIO:


#!/usr/bin/python3

import gi, sys
gi.require_version('Gtk', '3.0')
from gi.repository import Gtk, Gio, GLib

rec_mgr = Gtk.RecentManager.get_default()

for arg in sys.argv[1:]:
rec_mgr.add_item(Gio.File.new_for_path(arg).get_uri())

GLib.idle_add(Gtk.main_quit)
Gtk.main()


The last two lines are necessary to start the Gtk event loop; if you don’t do that, the changed signal from the manager won’t be handled, and the files won’t be added to the recently-used list.