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[Bug 60448] Re: .xsession-errors file grows out of control & saturates disk space

 

Someone already did, and it is called journald: http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/journalctl.html
Recent versions of gdm, kdm and dbus already use the journald by default to replace .xsession-errors, and thus avoid all these problems. I guess we only have to wait for Ubuntu to catch up to Fedora and OpenSuse. (I don't know about CentOS, but it unavoidable that journald will be the default there eventually)

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/60448

Title:
  .xsession-errors file grows out of control & saturates disk space

Status in gdm package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged
Status in kdebase package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in xinit source package in Dapper:
  Won't Fix

Bug description:
  Hi,

  I'm running Kubuntu Dapper, freshly dist-upgraded, on a Compaq
  Presario V2610CA laptop, with no particular esoteric configuration.

  In the past 2 weeks, my disk space has been saturated **TWICE**, i.e.
  up to 100% occ. on a 60 GB disk with 40 GB previously free, as
  reported by the "df -h" command (in fact app. 10 MB was still
  available, just enough to be able to boot/login!).  The cause of these
  events is what seems an ever-growing .xsession-errors file in one user
  directory. i.e. /home/user.  After a quick search on Google, I've
  found 2 similar reports (one concerning Dapper, the other OpenSuse):

  http://www.nabble.com/X-error-log-t1364627.html

  http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2005-10/msg00044.html

  
  However, I didn't find anything related to this problem on Launchpad...

  It 's quite possible that something is going wrong with my system and
  is filling the .xsession-errors file with various reports.  I did not
  have the chance to pinpoint what's going wrong since my only concern
  was to prevent my system from completely crashing.  That's why I
  deleted the file without trying to look at its content (my system was
  saturated to a point that I could not receive one simple e-mail, Kmail
  complaining about the lack of disk space...).  The only thing I know
  is that since 2 weeks, I use more frequently Skype and I have created
  a second user account for my wife to be able to manger her e-mails
  with Kmail and browse the Web with Konqueror a little bit.  Nothing so
  complex or heavy...

  Anyway, this report is not about what's going wrong with my system,
  but instead about the fact that an error-log file, like .xsession-
  errors, that is supposed to be useful to track problems, should not be
  the cause of a major critical problem like the lack of disk space!  I
  don't know what would be a satifying solution, but in my case I've set
  up a script to erase this file in root and all users directory at each
  hour, by putting an executable file with this content in
  /etc/cron.hourly:

  rm /home/*/.xsession-errors*
  rm /root/.xsession-errors*

  Thanks for your attention.

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