In Python: Get path and name of file that is open in LibreOffice and Evince

Question

In Python, I would like to determine the path and name of (all) the file(s), which have been opened in LibreOffice Writer and in Evince before.

Is there a mean to do this, also with help of the OS?

I'm working under Ubuntu Linux 14.04 64 Bit.

Thanks for any comments.

Answer 1

You can see a list of recent files in ~/.config/libreoffice/4/user/registrymodifications.xcu. I'm not 100% certain that the /4/user/ part of the path is absolute; this is just from looking on my machine.

You can add the following lines to the XCU file to edit the amount of history to keep, but that wont' do much for old files.

<prop oor:name="PickListSize" oor:type="xs:int">
 <value>20</value>
</prop>

To keep a running list, I would monitor that file and extract the recently opened documents when it changes. This would only be effective for files opened after you write your program - I'm not sure of a way to find out everything that was ever opened before you started watching it, though.

There are a couple of history manager extensions, which might provide some insight. I'm not sure about Evince specifically, but your recent files are stored at ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel, and you could probably take a similar approach by just regularly monitoring that file and aggregating its contents.