In Windows start menu, we can see the list of recently opened documents(text, word, excel, power point, image files etc). In Window earlier Windows releases and Server 2003, this is named ‘Recent Documents‘ where as in Windows 11 and Windows 10, it’s named ‘Recent Items‘. The list looks like the following in Windows 11 and Windows 10.
This list of recent documents/recent items can be deleted from command line by executing the below command.
reg delete HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerRecentDocs /a
The changes will be effective immediately.
Disable recent documents list in start menu
We can make Windows not to show the recent documents list in the start menu. This can be done by running the following command.
reg add HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced /v Start_ShowRecentDocs /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
In this case, the changes won’t be effective until you log off from the current session and log in back.
To enable recent items list we can run the following command.
reg add HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced /v Start_ShowRecentDocs /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
I have tested the above commands on Windows 11 and Windows 10 and have found them to be working. If you have tried this commands on Windows 11 and Windows 10, please share the results.
I realize I’m a year and half late to this party but…
In XP, for the delete command, /a doesn’t work. To delete the entire RecentDocs folder and subfolders, just use that command w/out the /a Or /va deletes all the keys in the RecentDocs folder but it leaves all the subfolders so you may end up w/ a lot of garbage… I didn’t test it further. I’m thinking of putting it in a shut-down event script, so /f is useful.
And for people like Bill… launch a command prompt, type in “reg delete /?” and you can see the switches that work. It took 30 extra seconds to figure out.
And no, you can’t delete a single file from the list unless you want to inspect keys stored in binary value. Maybe you shouldn’t be sneaking around on other peoples’ computers and trying to hide the evidence!
XP SP3 – fail. — Have you tested this? Have you viewed your page? (the code box is so small you can hardly see the code). How about adding a working script to download? Maybe include a way to delete a single file from the recent docs?
The same registry key holds the list of items on XP also, so it should work on XP too. I’ve changed the page to show the command clearly. Can you try again and share the result here?