.xsession-errors file in my home directory sometimes grows up to severeal hundred MB, although I don't experience any strange X server behaviour. It's a fresh SuSE 9 install. Can I disable writing to this file?

Some applicaion must be generating a lot of errors. Can you tell of some message or set of messages is being repeated in the file ?

Tim

I've found out that most of the errors are generated by playing divx movies:

fifo_audio_out: blocked for more than 20 ms,
fifo_audio_out: 1152 sample(s) discarded.
fifo_audio_out: blocked for more than 47 ms,
fifo_audio_out: 1152 sample(s) discarded.
fifo_audio_out: blocked for more than 47 ms,
fifo_audio_out: 1152 sample(s) discarded.
fifo_audio_out: blocked for more than 47 ms,
fifo_audio_out: 1152 sample(s) discarded.
fifo_audio_out: blocked for more than 46 ms,
fifo_audio_out: 1152 sample(s) discarded.
fifo_audio_out: blocked for more than 47 ms,
fifo_audio_out: 1152 sample(s) discarded.
fifo_audio_out: blocked for more than 47 ms,
(...)

and this goes on and on for hundreds of MB (if I watch the whole movie).

It looks to me like an application may have been configured with debugging turned on.

Do you know what application is generating these messages ? Is it something you compiled yourself or was it part of the distribution.

If you're using KDE you might be able to modify the applink icon or menu entry so that the app is run with standard error directed to /dev/null. The line would look like this :

program_name &> /dev/null

Tim

Thanks for your help Tim.

Those messages are generated by Kaffeine and Noatun - default media players on SuSE, however that doesn't happen with Totem, so I'll stick with it if I can't manage to fix this..
For some reason I can't play the movie if I start the player with that option. Is there a way to make all applications send standard error messages to /dev/null ?

No I don't think so. I don't know why the program won't run with stdout and stderr thrown away. You might also try the following :

program_name 2> /dev/null (only discards stderr, not stdout)

program_name 2> /dev/null &

Tim