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I have a desktop PC with Ubuntu 20.04 + KDE. Yesterday my program gets stopped due to a no space left on device error. I deleted some files and then found the freed space is soon occupied again. Through iotop I found that plasmashell is writing to the disk at ~19MB/s, so I killed the process. I have two questions:

  • What does plasmashell do? It seems to be related to the plasma desktop environment, but I wonder whether writing at 19MB/s until the disk is full is a bug, or do I need to worry about a virus?

  • Where does it write to? After killing the process the available disk space did not grow, which means whatever it has written to disk is still there. I'd prefer not to do a reboot because it is a remote machine (someone needs to be on site to log into the internet after the reboot).

trisct
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  • Have you explored where the writes go to? If a setting is incorrect, or many other config issues exist, apps can report that misconfiguration in log files issue to logs so they can be addressed by the user or admins of the system. Have you looked? Kubuntu/KDE is no longer supported for 20.04 (3 years only for flavors so issues are unlikely to be fixed now anyway, if they do exist). I'd ask an admin of the system to check the logs. – guiverc Sep 15 '23 at 04:17
  • @guiverc Through some digging I found the file was .xsession-errors which takes up 126GB. Seems to be a bug (unfavorable feature?) that has been reported 10 years ago: https://askubuntu.com/q/93718/1053356. – trisct Sep 15 '23 at 04:52
  • First, inspect the .xsession-errors file. Use less to page through the errors. You'll see that one set of error messages repeats and repeats and repeats. Fix that error. Then, log out of your graphical session (to ensure the file is closed), log into a text session (Ctrl-Alt-F#, where # is 1 to 4) and finally df -m .;rm ~/.xsession-errors;df -m . – waltinator Sep 15 '23 at 05:41

1 Answers1

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plasmashell is the binary that provides the desktop in a Plasma session. As to why it keeps writing to the file ~/.xsession-errors, you'd need to inspect the contents and fix the underlying issue.

As its name implies, that file is created when X11 has problems. The .xsession-errors file is where the X Window system logs all errors that occur within a graphical environment.

You can disable the logging of this file. Check the answers to this question to know how..

Uri Herrera
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