.xsession-errors Sometimes Eats All Available Hard Drive Space In XFCE

Recently i noticed hard drive space mysteriously vanishing on a company netbook. The problem was non intermittent and every byte of free space created was soon written to. The likely suspect was a log file but nothing in /var stood out as the offender.

A quick disk usage scan with Baobab revealed that the file was located in a user directory. Manually checking file sizes through thunar revealed the .xsession-errors file to be the culprit. Ballooning to a hefty 1.6GB it effectively made the system unusable.

Clearing this file immediately resulted in improved responsiveness to the system. However this can not be looked at as an actual fix, whatever is causing the errors is what needs to be addressed. Deleting an obese log file just defers the task of trouble shooting for another day.