On 13-Nov-08 22:03:12, Peter Alcibiades wrote:

There is probably a simple explanation of this bizarre event.

I got a popup message in Gnome saying that /home was out of space. It is a 200G partition, and there is not a whole lot on it, so this was puzzling. I did (after a few false starts)

find . -size +10G

and was astonished to be told there was just one, xsession-errors. OK, tried it with 20G.....same. Well in the end xsession-errors turned out to be 150G.

Keep an eye on xsession-errors before it gets big again. Something may be wrong somewhere, causing this massive build up of messages. Read it while you can, and try to track down the source.

Scratched my head for some minutes and then decided, why not, so I did rm. It went with no fuss. Then did du, and /home was now about 50G which seemed about right.

Next time you want to down-size it, try instead

cat /dev/null > .xsession-errors

(I'm assuming that's what it should really be called -- remember also that a simple 'ls -l' won't show files whose names begin with "." -- use ls -la instead).

This will make .xsession-errors into a file with zero bytes in, and it will be there when it's next looked for (i.e. when you start X). Again, I'm assuming that your troubles below may have been due to .xsession-errors being missing (or otherwise messed up).

Hoping this helps, Ted.

This seemed weird enough that help was needed. Now unable to start kmail. Logged off, now unable to log back in! It wasn't the WM, since it would not work with any of them. Rebooted, and now it invoked fschk on hda6, which is where /home is, and finally after about a minute or two, it fixed something that was orphaned. And now it has loaded OpenBox and kmail perfectly fine. All the files seem to be where they should be. I am just praying that it will launch Gnome, and still more, that the files will be there when it does.

What can it be? Anyone seen this before? This is Debian Lenny.

By the way, sorry to have missed the Reindeer tonight, I am still not quite well enough. Next time.

Peter

-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 13-Nov-08 Time: 22:14:40 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 10:03:12PM +0000, Peter Alcibiades wrote:

Scratched my head for some minutes and then decided, why not, so I did rm. It went with no fuss. Then did du, and /home was now about 50G which seemed about right.

It sounds like the file was still open when you rm'ed it and I /think/ think in this situation that it will show the space as free on the disk but won't actually remove the file until whatever app has the file open has quit. I know that if you delete an open file it won't free up the space until the app that has it open has quit but I can't quite recall what it will do with du etc.

It would have been helpful if you'd had a quick look at it to see what was complaining btw before deleting it ;)

Adam