Today I discovered a HUGE file in my home-folder, it was called “.xsession-error” and was a .txt file of 35,5GB!
What could this be?
If you do a Web search on this, you’ll see that it’s a common complaint. (My own .xsession-error file is over 200KB, just for the record.) Do a “tail .xsession-error” and see if it isn’t mostly “GTK” complaints. I’ll bet it is.
From that same Web search, you’ll see that there are any number of causes, but the most common seem to be mixing GTK (Gnome) with KDE stuff. Firefox is known to do it depending on the theme chosen. The problem is that so many apps want to report everything to that file for debugging. Very useful in some cases, but in others, it does just create a mondo-monster-huge-O file that’s really not that useful. 
Unless you’re actually having problems, you can just delete it.
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Hash: SHA1
Considering the information from smpoole7 you MAY want to change it into a
symlink pointing to something like /tmp/.yourUserName-xsession-error and
hopefully everything that writes to it will just send data to /tmp. You
MAY then want to set /tmp to be cleared on a reboot, which I do not
believe is the default for SUSE but you can change it easily enough:
Anyway I am not sure of all the ramifications of this but unless you’ve
been running for a LONG time you may have an application needlessly
spilling its guts (almost literally) to that file. If nothing else create
a cron job for yourself to delete it every week or so.
Note that the first solution above only works if you reboot regularly,
which isn’t exactly the status quo in Linux unless you have a weird need
to (battery dying on a laptop for example).
Good luck.
smpoole7 wrote:
> If you do a Web search on this, you’ll see that it’s a common complaint.
> (My own .xsession-error file is over 200KB, just for the record.) Do a
> “tail .xsession-error” and see if it isn’t mostly “GTK” complaints. I’ll
> bet it is.
>
> From that same Web search, you’ll see that there are any number of
> causes, but the most common seem to be mixing GTK (Gnome) with KDE
> stuff. Firefox is known to do it depending on the theme chosen. The
> problem is that so many apps want to report everything to that file
> for debugging. Very useful in some cases, but in others, it does just
> create a mondo-monster-huge-O file that’s really not that useful.
>
> Unless you’re actually having problems, you can just delete it.
>
>
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or just make a symlink to /dev/null like I did 
Let the black hole swallow it all
I guess someone could make the argument that it’s useful in the event that you do have a problem. Maybe another idea would be to put in a Cron job that deletes it daily.
Swerdna has a how-to on Cron that will help, if the OP isn’t familiar with it.
Cron Tables (Crontab) in Suse / openSUSE [Event Scheduler for 10.x, 11.x]