Teemu Likonen writes:
It seems that ~/.xsession-errors file can still grow to infinity in size. Sometimes it grows really fast. This is nothing new: we have all seen it and talked about it. What do you do to maintain this file?
Until now, I had not seen it as a problem. But it is quite large here, too: ~$ du -sh .xsession-errors 16M .xsession-errors
- Do you just delete it when you happen to notice it's too big?
I think that would be my approach, given that it seems to grow slowly here. First entry is from 30 Sep 2018 :)
- Do you configure some rotating system, perhaps with logrotate(8)?
(Why doesn't Debian have this automatically?)
I think the policy against having an automatism is to avoid changing the home directory contents by anything else than explicitly user-invoked applications.
- Do you add it to your backup system's ignore list so that a
potentially big file doesn't fill your backups?
I do not include /home in my backups at all (except for some specific subtrees) because there are a lot of applications writing unneeded files there. Consider the various recently-used-lists, cache files, thumbnails, GUI settings, trash folders whatever. Nothing to backup for me there. I opt to keep my data on an entirely different directory structure as to avoid applications dumping their files next to my personal data.
[...]
- Why is it normal that in Debian (and GNU/Linux) you need to manually
delete a hidden file to keep it from filling your hard disks?
There seem to be other areas that are constantly growing, too. APT downloaded package files come to mind. For /home-structures it is usually up to the user to fix it whereas the system-wide "growths" are better handled by the admin...
[...] Just my thoughts, YMMV Linux-Fan öö
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