5

I saw this post: Prevent gnome-shell's dash from listing Recent Items and I'm not able to remove the recently.used.xbel file.

Do I need to be root to do this?

-rw------- 1 ryan ryan 39157 2012-02-19 15:47 /home/ryan/.local/share/recently-used.xbel --

When I run

rm ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

I get

rm: cannot remove `/home/ryan/.local/share/recently-used.xbel': Operation not permitted

Running the same command with sudo returns the same error, and running nautilus as root also returns a similar error.

3
  • maybe that file is been used, try to remove on startup...
    – user23907
    Feb 28, 2012 at 1:13
  • 2
    Did you set it immutable at some point with chattr?
    – infinity
    Feb 28, 2012 at 1:32
  • 2
    what infinity said. Try ´sudo chattr -i ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel´, and then try to delete the file again.
    – martin
    Feb 28, 2012 at 13:53

4 Answers 4

3

what infinity said. Try ´sudo chattr -i ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel´, and then try to delete the file again.

– @severin

This did the trick. Thanks

0

~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel is in your home directory and belongs to your current user, so in short I can say: no, you don't need to be root to delete it.

But you need to be more specific about your problem.

1
  • When I run: rm ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel'code' I get rm: cannot remove `/home/ryan/.local/share/recently-used.xbel': Operation not permitted
    – rylhunt
    Feb 27, 2012 at 21:15
0

Try running: lsof |grep recently-used.xbel

This should show if some process has a lock on that file.

You can also try: rm -f ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

0

You could just do a

gksudo nautilus

or which filemanager you are using and simply browse to the file and delete it.

1
  • I still get "Error removing file: Operation not permitted"
    – rylhunt
    Feb 27, 2012 at 21:44

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