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

 

I confirm manuellopezibanez's stagement:  On my Fedora 21 system,
journald is used and there is no .xsession-errors file, like those I
still found on other Ubuntu machines around the house.

I'm just wondering if there are still legacy apps (or apps not so well
integrated with gdm/kdm/dbus), that may try to drop output in a
.xsession-errors file...

Anyway, I will be more than happy to close this report when Ubuntu catch
up on journald... and then, to stop posting birthday comments on Sept.
14 of each year ;-)

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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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