Ubuntu – limit the size of ~/.xsession-errors

I found an interim solution.

I put a small script in /etc/X11/Xsession.d called 91redirect-xsession-errors that does the job for now, but if you want to have your own custom symlink for .xession-errors it does not work for that (I tried and it did not output any data).

#!/bin/sh

# Redirect $HOME/.xsession-errors to /dev/null.
# BJEM 11 January 2012

XSESSION_ERRFILE=$HOME/.xsession-errors

# This does not seem to work for a regular file,
# i.e. if you want to symlink $HOME/.xsession-errors
# to another file.  I do not know why.
XSESSION_ERRFILE_FINAL=/dev/null

# Creates target file if it does not exist.
touch "$XSESSION_ERRFILE_FINAL"

# Link .xsession-errors file to the desired target
# no matter what.
ln -sf "$XSESSION_ERRFILE_FINAL" "$XSESSION_ERRFILE"

# Test case.
#gedit &

##### END OF FILE #####

It's a bit 'rough and ready' but it does the job for me. Note that this is the only file that has been altered.

~/.xsession is only used when no X session is selected. Use ~/.xsessionrc to run programs at startup.

As using ~/.Xdefaults is obsolete, Ubuntu, like about any other modern X environment, uses ~/.Xresources at startup (see for example here for some reasons). So if you put your settings in ~/.Xresources you don't need to run xrdb as Ubuntu is doing this for you.

See /etc/X11/Xsession and /etc/X11/Xsession.d/* if you want to know more about what Ubuntu is doing when you start a X session.