Last night I was downloading a couple of torrents to my home partition. For some reason, I reasoned that I could free up a good amount of space for these by deleting the stuff in /tmp. I proceeded to delete the /tmp files (including some hidden files). At this point, I started getting a dcopserver error, something about inter-process communications not being able to start. At the time I was monitoring home partition disk usage by "df -h ~" in konsole, and I noticed that, when the dcopserver errors started, the disk began filling up at about 10M per second. I think it went through about 300-400M before it ran out of disk space, and every time I made more space by deleting some files (mainly from my desktop), it would quickly eat that up.

How would I go about getting this space back? The obvious answer is to delete files, but how would I find the files that grew so aggressively? What program would fill up a home directory when dcopserver is failing?

Probably some log file. But that highly depends on your configuration and how do you use X.

To erase tmp files that are being used (by dcop or any other thing) is not a good thing. To ease the thing, I would just exit X (by doing "init 1", for example), and operate from console when doing this kind of thing.