On Tue, 17 Oct 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> 1 - The problem was caused by a huge (>200 Mega) file named
> /root/.xsession-errors. Can anyone tell me how and why this file was created
> (apart from the obvious meaning of its name) and how to prevent this happening
> in the future?
this file is created in the home of a user that started an X session.
it contains every errors that any further X program will generate until
the end of the session. very often, this file is not cleared by ending
the X session and the next session just appends to it. so it would grow
for ever...
the first point here is that you should avoid to start an X session as
root, but better start as a normal user then in a subshell, do su and
start the xprogram that needs to be root...
> 2 - After deleting the file, I still got error messages about a full device, so
because removing a file that in fact is still open by a process, only
removes the directory entry and not the content. the content will be
removed only when the process that still write into it will end...
so you have to find the faulty process first (here the root X session,
and some X programs that was making a lot of errors).
> I wanted to run fsck -A to see what was going on. I got a message saying that
> it's dangerous to run this on a mounted file system, so I stopped. Should I
> have continued?
no, it's really a bad idea to process a file system while in use.
> 3 - Since the only other way I could think of to run fsck was to re-boot, I
> tried that and couldn't even re-boot - I guess lack of space was preventing the
> system from writing logs or something. So the only solution (as much as I hated
> to do it) was to hit the RESET button. After re-booting, everything was OK and
> I now have plenty of space on the device. Again, was there a better way to do
> this?
yes. look at the content of the file and particularly at the end of it
with, say, a command like :
tail .xsession-error
and guess who's writing like a fool into it.
stop the concerned process if possible, remove or shorten the file.
or move it to another disk for further study.
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