On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 21:35, Roger Searle wrote:
> then to konqueror to see that .xsession-errors is 8.3GB !!!
> so...
> rm .xsession-errors
>
> Thanks for the help finding this. The obvious question now being:
> what was causing that?
I am going to answer this question in a general way :)
When a program encounters an error it is considered good form to report
the error. Normally the errors are reported to a terminal, such as when
you execute
ls ~/MichaelRulezOK
GUI programs (which normally use the X11 windowing system under Linux)
often do not have a terminal to display errors on. To get around this,
all errors for X programs that ran without a terminal during the current
"session" (the time spent logged in) are put into a hidden file called
".xsession-errors"[1]. This way, if something goes wrong you can find
out about it. If a single program encounters a lot of errors, this file
can get very big, very fast. On the bright side, the ".xsession-errors"
file is normally deleted when you login, so the problem rarely lasts.
[1] See XSession(5) for more detail.
--
Michael JasonSmith http://www.ldots.org/
