Comment 72 for bug 60448

I also stumbled across this thread as well when my .xsession-errors file filled up my harddrive completely, twice...

Just like to shed some extra light on this.

First of all, I'm running a CentOS installation atm, and am also bitten. So this is not a distribution or desktop specific error.

There are several posts telling people to delete the file, or have it automatically be rotated. However, that will not work unless you also log out, as there are many processes keeping the file open for future error messages and the OS will not free the space until all processes that hold the file have closed it. This might explain some posts saying that the disk space keeps getting eaten up even after deleting the file.

As we will probably never be able to trust all programmers to handle error output in a suitable manner, we need a common solution that would also handle misbehaving programs. As someone else mentioned, syslog/messages already handles this with
.... last message repeated X times
Every program writing to syslog do that through a common API. 'someone' with influence need to come up with a similar solution and force every program to use that for user/desktop error reports as well. That is the only long term solution.

Anyway, here are the possible solutions as of now:
1. Log out and in periodically to prevent the file to grow too large. (As I seldom do that, and the systems I run never do, that is not a suitable solution for me....)
2. Have messages normally going to .xsession-errors go to /dev/null instead. This can be done by altering /etc/X11/xinit/Xsession (at least on my system). Of course, this removes the possibility of ever discovering there is a problem, but at least I can keep my hard drive to myself....
3. Wait for someone to make a proper API and have all programs use that for error output....