HUGE .xsession-error file

[Siri Amrit Kaur]

On Monday 15 August 2005 10:12 am June Tate kindly wrote:
>
> $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. 

This helps explain things, thanks!

> 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)
>
Well I had a  letter in composition that sat unfinished overnight 
until this morning, when I deleted it. I didn't delete it 689 times, 
though. And since I deleted the contents of .xsession-errors 
yesterday, the 689 messages had to have been about that one letter. 
Any idea why it repeats itself so many times?

> 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)

This helps a LOT! I think I'll try adding the line to the top of 
the .xsession-errors file. That way if I ever need to see what's 
happening it'll all be there until the next time I log out and log in 
again.

Siri Amrit