On 2025-09-14, Michael wrote: > On Sunday, 14 September 2025 10:39:53 British Summer Time Peter Humphrey > wrote: >> On Sunday, 14 September 2025 09:56:09 British Summer Time Dale wrote: >> > Howdy, >> > >> > I was doing my backups which includes config files. I noticed one file >> > was shall we say, large. The better term might be HUGE. This is the >> > culprit. >> > >> > >> > >> > root@Gentoo-1 / # ls /home/dale/.local/share/sddm/xorg-session.log >> > -rw-r--r-- 1 dale users 13,905,915,860 Sep 14 03:33 >> > /home/dale/.local/share/sddm/xorg-session.log >> > root@Gentoo-1 / #
I'll guess that's one of these situations where all stdout and stderr of a graphical session are redirected to a file. This would include also stdout and stderr of all processes started through graphical menus (as opposed to started from terminal emulators or started outside the X11 session (by setting $DISPLAY, and possibly using TCP if enabled and allowed, etc.)). And I think at least GTK+ can be quite verbose issuing warnings. Some applications may also opt to output informational lines to their output. >> Mine is 32K. > > The size of this log file increases over time. If you reboot/restart your > desktop daily, the file will be overwritten and remain at a reasonable size - > my wayland-session.log is currently ~ 165kB. > > Dale does not reboot often, so the file will grow until it is > deleted/rotated. Why do you expect this to be rotated or deleted? While some tools will do this (I think one example being the X server with its own log files, for the server itself), in the absence of specific features to do so, log files are not rotated. >> > I added the commas to the file size. Obviously one shouldn't try to >> > open a file that size with Kwrite or anything. It's just to large. >> > Heck, it took several minutes for the tail command to get this. (You may be aware of this, and that may have been just to illustrate the enormous size, but in case you aren't, at least GNU ls has the "-h"/"--human-readable" flag.) >> > >> > root@Gentoo-1 / # tail -n 100 >> > /home/dale/.local/share/sddm/xorg-session.log >> > Service ":1.6973" unregistered >> > QSocketNotifier: Invalid socket 5 and type 'Read', disabling... >> > ark.kerfuffle: Could not detect mimetype from content. Using >> > extension-based mimetype: "text/x-log" >> > root@Gentoo-1 / # >> > >> > As you can see, I asked for the last 100 lines but it only gave me >> > that. Obviously something is off with that file and maybe sddm as >> > well. Is it possible that this was caused by file modification? >> > First, I'd like to make that file MUCH smaller, empty would be OK. >> > Second, I'd like to stop it from getting that big again. I tried using >> > echo to make it only one line. It went something like this. >> > >> > echo "" > /home/dale/.local/share/sddm/xorg-session.log >> > >> > I thought it worked at first but by the time my backup script got to it, >> > it was back again, hugely back. Now it doesn't do anything even though >> > I'm root. I can't seem to empty this file or really see what is in it >> > either. You could also use truncate, but if something is writing to it with an offset, my guess is you'll end either with the same on-disk size or a sparse file if you're lucky. >> > >> > Can someone share a better way to fix this file? Oh, I googled. The >> > info I found was people using systemd. They used commands I don't have >> > since I use openrc. >> >> Why not just delete it? Then xorg will start afresh. Deleting it is indeed a way to go, you'll lose all the new content from still running writers, but if it reappears, it'll be recreated from scratch. Unless some tool is being overzealous and doing unexpected things like writing to it based on reopening the filename and not by keeping a handle. And that's probably not likely, as most processes writing to it are probably writing there because it's opened at file descriptors 1 and 2. > You can automate the rotation of this file with logrotate. Just add it in > the > logrotate.d/ directory and specify a maximum size you're happy with, e.g. > "size 3M" and/or how long before it is rotated, e.g. "weekly". (logrotate has a default configuration for user dirs under /home?) -- Nuno Silva
