Huge .xsession-errors

[yvsong]

Hi,

Just deleted my ~/.xsession-errors bigger than 8G bytes. The new file keeps growing by appending the "fDischargeMeanRate" message. What's happening?

(Linux 2.6.32-22-generic #36-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jun 3 19:31:57 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux)

[Zorael]

As a workaround, you could make a startup script that deletes the file and makes a symbolic link to /dev/null, effectively discarding everything written to it.

#!/bin/bash

rm ~/.xsession-errors
ln -s /dev/null ~/.xsession-errors

Obviously, by doing this you opt out of any interesting tidbits that may be output to there. I found that the only error logs I really ended up reading were /var/log/Xorg.0.log{.old} and /var/log/kdm.log anyway.

[Phkillah]

As a workaround, you could make a startup script that deletes the file and makes a symbolic link to /dev/null, effectively discarding everything written to it.

#!/bin/bash

rm ~/.xsession-errors
ln -s /dev/null ~/.xsession-errors

Obviously, by doing this you opt out of any interesting tidbits that may be output to there. I found that the only error logs I really ended up reading were /var/log/Xorg.0.log{.old} and /var/log/kdm.log anyway.

Awesome.
Thanks.
Just deleted a 17.3G xsession-errors file..... doh..

[beijbom]

Hi all,

I'm having the same problem but mutated and even ugglier.

Following the suggested workaround I instead got a huge .xsession-errors[jumble of letters].

When I noticed this, I simply deleted the file, and then modified the script to say rm ~/.xsession-errors*.

Alas, what is happening now is that that same file is being created, at least sort of. If I do

lsof | awk '{print $7 $9}' | sort -nr | less

the top 20 hits are that very same (huge) file, with identical inode numbers.

Needless to day a df call tells me the drive if full, but a search with sudo du -shx at the root tells me ~23 Gb used (out of 100 Gb). Oh, and a restart solves the problem temporarily. The only programs I'm running are matlab and chrome. The pace of which the used portion of the drive (as revealed by df) increases significantly once I start running these.

At this point, I'm quite in despair. Any suggestions would be useful.

[bugssoren]

Had the same problem with 11GB .xsession-errors. Fixed it with a solution I found to disable the recent history too.

rm .xsession-errors
touch .xsession-errors
sudo chattr -i .xsession-errors

Simply delete the file. Create an empty file. Set the immutable attribute. Which makes the file protected against writing and deleting. Nothing can be logged.

Note that until you logout the file space deleted is not unallocated because the file is being held open.

[benemorius]

Note that until you logout the file space deleted is not unallocated because the file is being held open.

Thanks for the heads up. I was able to avoid that unpleasantness by truncating the file (echo > ~/.xsession-errors) rather than deleting it. Mine was 119GB. Do I win a prize?

[jzarob]

I succeeded in getting the file back down to normal size (or non existent at all) by reinstalling compiz-core.
Just run the following command in the terminal to reinstall the compiz-core files:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall compiz-core

[Timothy_Sesow]

Here's a simple thing that caused my .xsession-errors file to grow out of control.
Vino-server was turned on in one of my desktop systems and configure with uPNP
to allow outside VNC requests. I notice a brute force attack on the desktop (I had
a good password), and the log fills with the invalid attempts to connect to VNC.
The log will have something similar to the following:

11/10/2013 06:12:21 AM 50-192-221-54-static.hfc.comcastbusiness.net
11/10/2013 06:12:21 AM 50-192-221-54-static.hfc.comcastbusiness.net
11/10/2013 06:12:21 AM host-130.97-90-209-dedication.srv.nethosting.com
11/10/2013 06:12:21 AM hosting.media-dsign.de
11/10/2013 06:12:21 AM 50-192-221-54-static.hfc.comcastbusiness.net
11/10/2013 06:12:21 AM 50-192-221-54-static.hfc.comcastbusiness.net
11/10/2013 06:12:21 AM 50-192-221-54-static.hfc.comcastbusiness.net
11/10/2013 06:12:21 AM 50-192-221-54-static.hfc.comcastbusiness.net
11/10/2013 06:12:21 AM 50-192-221-54-static.hfc.comcastbusiness.net
11/10/2013 06:12:21 AM 50-192-221-54-static.hfc.comcastbusiness.net
11/10/2013 06:12:21 AM 50-192-221-54-static.hfc.comcastbusiness.net
11/10/2013 06:12:21 AM 50-192-221-54-static.hfc.comcastbusiness.net
11/10/2013 06:12:21 AM Client Protocol Version 3.4
11/10/2013 06:12:21 AM Ignoring minor version mismatch


** (vino-server:23797): WARNING **: Deferring authentication of '50-192-221-54-static.hfc.comcastbusiness.net' for 5 seconds




** (vino-server:23797): WARNING **: VNC authentication failure from '50-192-221-54-static.hfc.comcastbusiness.net'

The xsession-errors file grew to 700GBytes eventually.