HUGE .xsession-error file

[June Tate]

On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 09:48:49AM -0700, Siri Amrit Kaur wrote:
> On Monday 15 August 2005 09:37 am Jeremy C. Reed kindly wrote:
> > On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, Siri Amrit Kaur wrote:
> > > tigerflag at localhost:~$ sort ~/.xsession-errors | uniq -c | sort
> > > -n | tail
> > >      6 Couldn't find interface ppp0: No such device
> > >      6 Opener: received RemoveSecret
> > >      8 Opener: received OpenResolv
> > >     10 kdecore (KAction): WARNING:
> > > KActionCollection::KActionCollection( QObject *parent, const char
> > > *name, KInstance *instance )
> > >     14 Xlib:  extension "XFree86-DRI" missing on display ":0.0".
> > >     24 kio (KIOConnection): ERROR: Could not write data
> > >     28 QPixmap: Cannot create a QPixmap when no GUI is being used
> > >     57 konqueror: ERROR: Error in
> > > BrowserExtension::actionSlotMap(), unknown action :
> > > searchProvider
> > >    126 QGDict::hashKeyString: Invalid null key
> > >    689 appending message to ~/dead.letter.tmp
>
> Thanks, Jeremy. I did delete it yesterday. Right now it's only 46.3 
> KB, which is smaller than I've seen it in a long time. Something 
> writes to the file almost constantly. Lines repeat themselves 
> hundreds of times, like what you see here. I _haven't_ deleted a 
> message 689 times!

$HOME/.xsession-errors is generally created by startx or other X
related startup programs (like GDM, XDM, and so on). Since the
programs that you run under X don't have a real controlling terminal,
these status/error messages end up being redirected to a file
somewhere -- in this case your $HOME/.xsession-errors file. The
downside to this is that if you don't clean up that file yourself on a
regular basis, it ends up huge. Even though you didn't delete a
message 689 times _right now_, over time these messages will build
up. (btw: the $HOME/dead.letter.tmp file is typically created when you
start writing a reply email and then cancel it)

Unfortunately, since most of those really are valid error messages (or
status messages, for that matter), the only way to clean it up is to
either setup a personal cronjob that runs every hour or so that
truncates the file, or insert a line into your $HOME/.xsession file
that does the same thing.

So for the cronjob, you'd want to issue a "crontab -e" command and
then add the following line to the file that pops up:

     0 * * * * /bin/echo >$HOME/.xsession-errors

This line means "at any hour, of any day, of any month, any day of the
week, when the minute is zero, truncate $HOME/.xsession-errors". I've
written it this way because if you just do an "rm" in there instead,
it'll likely break a program looking for that file to write it's error
log to.

If, instead, you're looking at wanting to just clean out the
.xsession-error every time you start X, simply add the following line
to the top of your $HOME/.xsesssion file:

     /bin/echo >$HOME/.xsession-errors

This will cause the file to be truncated every time you start X.

Hope that helps some. =o)

-- 
June Tate * http://www.theonelab.com * june at theonelab.com
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