Hi, I take no credit for the following by Alex Cabal:

https://alexcabal.com/disabling-gnom...he-better-way/


To keep recently-used files cleared in Nautilus in ubuntu 16.04.2 64 I had to use inotify-tools and the script placed in startup applications, which A. Cabal provided. Trouble is, I couldn't make it work for two days. I went bats and tried placing the script as a root script in cron.d, and that didn't work either.
The devil was in the details. A. Cabal's script has a non-literal path to the monitor-recently-used script, a path that begins with ~/
Change this to literal by going into the GUI startup applications and browsing to the script and save, then IT WORKS. Example of a literal path /home/yourdirectory/monitor-recently-used