Working in a shell it is sometimes desirable to seemlessly work with files accessed just before in other parts of the GNOME environment. Of course filename completion already saves us a lot of keystrokes in the shell but sometimes I find it difficult to remember the directory part of the first few characters of such a recently used file. This pathetic little script helps me out in these cases.
In the following example I just downloaded a cross compilation toolchain for the Zephyr OS with Firefox and for installation I need to make it executable and run it. Without the need to remember the download directory or the filename itself, this is then easy to do:
dzu@krikkit:~$ gnome-recent
/home/dzu/Downloads/zephyr-toolchain-arm-0.12.2-x86_64-linux-setup.run
dzu@krikkit:~$ chmod a+x `gnome-recent`
dzu@krikkit:~$ sudo `gnome-recent`
[sudo] Passwort für dzu:
Verifying archive integrity... 100% All good.
Uncompressing arm toolchain for Zephyr 100%
Enter target directory for SDK (default: /root/zephyr-sdk/):The shell scripts requires jq and
the xq tool bundled with yq.
While jq is usually available in distibutions, yq can be
installed via the Python package manager pip. In a Debian based
environment these two commands should usually do the trick:
sudo apt install jq pip3 install yq