Is there a way to access the "Recent Items" list from the terminal?
You can read the recent items plist file.

    defaults read $HOME/Library/Preferences/com.apple.recentitems


There's a lot of "noise" in the output. You can filter the "noise" with grep and list the last entry with tail which should be the last file opened (but not always the case).

    defaults read $HOME/Library/Preferences/com.apple.recentitems | grep "Name" | tail -n 1