This is most likely a process that is sending some kind of notification
to root or other user, but local sendmail is misconfigured.  Eventually
is gives up and dumps the message text a file called ~/dead.letter.

Search for dead.letter in each home directory.  The contents should give
you a clue as to what is generating it.

You could also run Jeremy's command through `watch` to see how often it
is incrementing.

$watch "sort ~/.xsession-errors | uniq -c | sort -n | tail"

...Kevin



On Mon, 2005-08-15 at 09:48 -0700, Siri Amrit Kaur wrote:
> On Monday 15 August 2005 09:37 am Jeremy C. Reed kindly wrote:
> > On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, Siri Amrit Kaur wrote:
> > > tigerflag@localhost:~$ sort ~/.xsession-errors | uniq -c | sort
> > > -n | tail
> > >      6 Couldn't find interface ppp0: No such device
> > >      6 Opener: received RemoveSecret
> > >      8 Opener: received OpenResolv
> > >     10 kdecore (KAction): WARNING:
> > > KActionCollection::KActionCollection( QObject *parent, const char
> > > *name, KInstance *instance )
> > >     14 Xlib:  extension "XFree86-DRI" missing on display ":0.0".
> > >     24 kio (KIOConnection): ERROR: Could not write data
> > >     28 QPixmap: Cannot create a QPixmap when no GUI is being used
> > >     57 konqueror: ERROR: Error in
> > > BrowserExtension::actionSlotMap(), unknown action :
> > > searchProvider
> > >    126 QGDict::hashKeyString: Invalid null key
> > >    689 appending message to ~/dead.letter.tmp
> >
> > Nothing there to explain why the file is getting to a gigabyte in
> > size -- unless you just deleted it.
> >
> > I do wonder why it has the last message 689 times though. I am not
> > sure what that is for, but maybe it means you started to compose a
> > message and then canceled it 689 times.
> >
> > Maybe wait until tomorrow or when it is large again and try that
> > again to see what lines are logged a lot.
> >
> >   Jeremy C. Reed
> >
> Thanks, Jeremy. I did delete it yesterday. Right now it's only 46.3 
> KB, which is smaller than I've seen it in a long time. Something 
> writes to the file almost constantly. Lines repeat themselves 
> hundreds of times, like what you see here. I _haven't_ deleted a 
> message 689 times!
> 
> Siri Amrit
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