Firstly, this discussion is specifically about typical Linux installations and programs which are mostly run on Linux. While I expect that similar issues can be found with *BSD it's still obviously related to the Unix family of OSs. Also it should be noted that LUV has never at any time been opposed to discussion of other free Unix OSs, at the very first meeting when names were being discussed it was generally agreed that FreeBSD was on-topic for all LUV events. This discussion belongs on luv-main. On Wed, 10 Jul 2013, "Trent W. Buck" <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:

Brian May wrote:

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Programs shouldn't even be recording all of the stuff in ~/.xsession-errors

As Russell pointed out, that's just where X's stderr (and stdout, I think) goes.

I didn't directly say that, but I think I implied it clearly. For people with our experience there isn't really a difference, but for some people the fact that you can run an application and see it's output doesn't necessarily imply stdout/stderr.

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Just noticed mine is filling up fast with the following error. I think I might have to investigate this. Not really sure what is running amixer though (I use awesome, so no, not gome/kde stuff)

I filled /home a couple of times due to .xsession-errors.

I've done that too. This is really a serious problem, particularly when you have so many ways that running out of disk space can cause data loss. For example most of the history of Kmail has had it lose mail from POP servers if you run out of disk space. Also the earlier versions of BTRFS would behave badly in ways you really won't like if all disk space was used up.

I found on Debian, chmod -w'ing it causes it to fill /tmp instead (and for me that's a tmpfs and I reboot regularly, so it neatly sidesteps the issue).

Losing data from /tmp shouldn't be such a problem in theory at least. In practice I'm sure that there are more than a few programs which write truncated data to other filesystems if /tmp if full. :( -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/