Clearing the Finder sidebar “Recents” folder contents

[Scirroco]

Computer: Mac Mini M1, OS 12.0.1


I did an erase and clean re-install of my Mac following the public release of Monterey. The majority of my documents, photos, emails, keychains etc. are stored in iCloud and got downloaded and the others I manually copied to their correct locations from an external hard disk.
There was only minimum inspection of the contents of each folder, but everything seemed present and I opened only a couple to files to check they were the correct versions.
When I clicked on “Recents” in the Finder sidebar, it brought up a window with something like a few hundred images, documents, icon images - none of which I had been looking at and many that I had forgotten from some years back.
I drilled down to the relevant “Recents” folder (/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/MyLibraries/myDocuments.cannedSearch/Resources/search.savedSearch) and there they all were.
I appreciate that each file in that folder is only a link to the original file, but if that link is deleted, the original file gets deleted.
I don’t really care how the “Recents” folder got so filled, but I do want it cleared.
Does anyone have any idea on how I can flush out the contents of the “Recents” folder? I use “Recents” (used to use it) regularly as the quick go-to and it is now so crowded that I struggle to find what I want.
Disabling Spotlight on the main HDD only clears it temporarily (all of the files reappearing when Spotlight is re-enabled to re-index the HDD) and none of the other suggestions (Clear Menu >> Recent Items, etc.) have any effect.

 

[macbookm1airlover]

Best I can think of is this...run a custom query. I'm not sure if this will save every time you reboot the Mac or not...it's worth a shot perhaps!

 

[Red Menace]

The .savedSearch bundle is just a search query (like a regular Finder search). The results (which are dynamically created when the search is performed) are displayed in the same way as a folder, but it is just a Finder construct and not a real folder, so you can’t "flush out" the contents. As mentioned, you can tweak the query parameters to reduce the number of matches (or just not use the search).