Re: The .xsession-errors problem
On Wed, 28 Oct 2020 at 00:45, Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Ma, 27 oct 20, 07:55:00, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> > On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 11:07:37PM +0000, Tixy wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2020-10-26 at 18:35 +0200, Teemu Likonen wrote:
> > > > 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?
> > > Don't do anything here. The file is created fresh at each boot and is
> > > 30 lines long [...]
> > Something that you're doing, or something that was done for you, is
> > clearing that file. Your case is not the default. By default, that
> > file is never cleared, and just keeps growing. Most people prune it
> > manually whenever they notice it getting bigger than they like, which
> > is usually somewhere between "once a year" and "never".
> On my system the file is rotated (renamed to .xsession-errors.old), on
> every login as far as I can tell.
> Didn't find (yet) what is doing this (using lightdm, LXDE and minimal
> Xorg).
I had a curiosity about this, because some people are reporting that they
need to manage their growing .xsession-errors file by various methods,
but I never have seen this.
I see the same behaviour as Andrei, and I also use parts of LXDE.
I investigated, guided by this teaching from Reco:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2020/04/msg00583.html
I found that the process that renames the file to .xsession-errors.old
is the binary /usr/bin/lxsession owned by the user, with the parent
process lightdm owned by root.
/usr/bin/lxsession is a component of LXDE, so this won't apply to
users of other GUI providers.
The rename occurs when the user logs in from lightdm. The filename
.xsession-errors is defined in the script file /etc/X11/Xsession
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