On Tue, 17 Oct 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> since I never boot my machine and rarely have to restart X, this really does
> explain why the file got big. Is it allowed to manually edit the file while X
> is up to remove history, or do I have to restart X for that?
there is a dirty method you could use. every once in a while (perhaps even
via a cron job), execute the command:
:>/path/to/.xsession-error
note the leading ':' in the above command - it is part of the command to
type.
this will cause the file's _contents_ to be erased, freeing up the disk
space. on the next time the X program writes to the file, 'ls -l' will
show that the file is very large, but 'ls -s' will show it is actually
using a very small ammount of disk space. this is because the program that
writes to the file, writes at a location one after the previous write
(e.g. location '455372' in the file). this strange paradox is due to the
way files are kept on disk on most unix file system types - locatoins
which were not written to are not allocated any disk block for data, and
trying to read form them yields a set of '0' values returned back to the
reading program.
you oculd find more info about this in books such as 'design and
implementation of unix operating system' by moshe J. bach .
hope this helps,
guy
"For world domination - press 1,
or dial 0, and please hold, for the creator." -- nob o. dy
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