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#1 2026-01-06 23:24:16

ff255
Member
Registered: 2018-02-19
Posts: 7  

Thunar flooding .xsession-errors after Excalibur upgrade

Hello/
After upgrade from Daedalus to Excalibur I noticed that sometimes thunar is flooding .xsession-errors (~4 times per second)

(Thunar:2167): exo-CRITICAL **: 02:18:49.254: IA__exo_icon_view_get_selected_items: assertion 'EXO_IS_ICON_VIEW (icon_view)' failed

(Thunar:2167): exo-CRITICAL **: 02:18:49.255: IA__exo_icon_view_get_selected_items: assertion 'EXO_IS_ICON_VIEW (icon_view)' failed

(Thunar:2167): exo-CRITICAL **: 02:18:49.954: IA__exo_icon_view_get_selected_items: assertion 'EXO_IS_ICON_VIEW (icon_view)' failed

(Thunar:2167): exo-CRITICAL **: 02:18:49.955: IA__exo_icon_view_get_selected_items: assertion 'EXO_IS_ICON_VIEW (icon_view)' failed

(Thunar:2167): exo-CRITICAL **: 02:18:50.055: IA__exo_icon_view_get_selected_items: assertion 'EXO_IS_ICON_VIEW (icon_view)' failed

(Thunar:2167): exo-CRITICAL **: 02:18:50.055: IA__exo_icon_view_get_selected_items: assertion 'EXO_IS_ICON_VIEW (icon_view)' failed

(Thunar:2167): exo-CRITICAL **: 02:18:50.755: IA__exo_icon_view_get_selected_items: assertion 'EXO_IS_ICON_VIEW (icon_view)' failed

(Thunar:2167): exo-CRITICAL **: 02:18:50.756: IA__exo_icon_view_get_selected_items: assertion 'EXO_IS_ICON_VIEW (icon_view)' failed

Quick search didn't find anything useful...
Is it only my setup screwed?

UPD: restarting Thunar helps but I've seen this several times already...
What can I do to to fix it?

Last edited by ff255 (2026-01-07 02:19:35)

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#2 2026-01-07 15:00:54

stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn
Member
Registered: 2023-11-27
Posts: 472  

Re: Thunar flooding .xsession-errors after Excalibur upgrade

this may give some insight:

https://developer.xfce.org/exo/ExoIconView.html#exo-icon-view-get-selected-items

not a solution but better than not knowing.


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#3 2026-01-07 17:29:02

greenjeans
Member
Registered: 2017-04-07
Posts: 1,426  
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Re: Thunar flooding .xsession-errors after Excalibur upgrade

Aaargh, good ol' .xsession-errors again...I have a love/hate relationship with that function.

I have after much work, made Vuu-do's file almost pristine perfect in Openbox/PcmanFM, yet if I switch to Mate, with all else being exactly the same, i'll get some glib-gio critical error nonsense fairly regularly. At one point it went ballistic but upstream fixed that pretty quick.

Something about DE's man...they all come with issues that it's hard for a user to fix locally.


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#4 2026-01-07 18:43:26

golinux
Administrator
Registered: 2016-11-25
Posts: 3,631  

Re: Thunar flooding .xsession-errors after Excalibur upgrade

.xsession-errors is the first thing I delete after reboot . . . if I can remember! LOL!

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#5 2026-01-07 21:28:41

Altoid
Member
Registered: 2017-05-07
Posts: 1,966  

Re: Thunar flooding .xsession-errors after Excalibur upgrade

Hello:

ff255 wrote:

... is flooding .xsession-errors ...

See these two posts (as well as the other ones in the thread)*:

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=12265#p12265
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=45348#p45348

TL;DR:

I wrote:

... xsession-errors are just a part of life so the thing is to keep the log files from growing.

* the Search function we have here at [dev1] can be, more often than not, quite useful.

Best,

A.

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#6 Yesterday 22:12:23

ff255
Member
Registered: 2018-02-19
Posts: 7  

Re: Thunar flooding .xsession-errors after Excalibur upgrade

Wow, guys, thank you all for your help!
Unfortunately I can't reproduce this Thunar error... it usually happens when it's time to sleep smile
So I'll keep an eye on it.
And (imho) the best fix/workaround would be to setup a cronjob for .xsession-errors cleaning (special thanks to Altoid!)

Strange, but when testing in terminal without cron this command tail -10000 /home/$(whoami)/.xsession-errors > /home/$(whoami)/.xsession-errors somehow zeroes the file... well, anyway it's another topic... and it's time to sleep.

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#7 Yesterday 23:04:37

RedGreen925
Member
Registered: 2024-12-07
Posts: 263  

Re: Thunar flooding .xsession-errors after Excalibur upgrade

tail -10000 /home/$(whoami)/.xsession-errors > /home/$(whoami)/.xsession-errors
somehow zeroes the file... well, anyway it's another topic

Of course it does a single > redirect tells the system to overwrite the file creating new version I would think the -10000 tells tail to go back so far it has nothing to put into the file it creates so it is empty. If you wanted the file contents to remain then the >> append to the file should be used then its contents will remain and whatever the command is doing will be added to the file.

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#8 Today 17:18:17

chris2be8
Member
Registered: 2018-08-11
Posts: 362  

Re: Thunar flooding .xsession-errors after Excalibur upgrade

Assuming you want to keep just the last 10000 lines of .xsession-errors then a script like the following should work.

cd /home/$(whoami)
tail -10000 .xsession-errors > .xsession-errors.new
cat .xsession-errors.new >.xsession-errors
rm .xsession-errors.new

That *should* work even assuming .xsession-errors is open and being written to (so you can't just rename it without losing all further output). But I *havn't* tested it so use at your own risk.

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#9 Today 18:50:55

Altoid
Member
Registered: 2017-05-07
Posts: 1,966  

Re: Thunar flooding .xsession-errors after Excalibur upgrade

Hello:

ff wrote:

... best fix/workaround would be to setup a cronjob for .xsession-errors cleaning ...

This solution came from Daniel López Azaña's blog. 
I just relayed the message, so to speak.

There is also a page called [crontab.guru] where you can check your [crontab] syntax, among other things.
Go have a read, it is very comprehensive and useful to have in the browser bookmarks.

Here is how I do it, works a charm:
See man [crontab] on how to edit it.

# Entries added to keep log files from growing too large
# http://www.daniloaz.com/en/how-to-prevent-the-xsession-errors-file-from-growing-to-huge-size
#
# Set logfiles to 2Mb and 200 lines max. checking for size every 23 hours
# see https://crontab.guru/#0_*/23_*_*_*
#
# File size examples:
#
# 150Mb -> 150000
# 100Mb -> 100000
# 15Mb  ->  15000
# 10Mb  ->  10000
#  5Mb  ->   5000
#  2Mb  ->   2000
#
# to test cronjob run at 2 min intervals
# example -> */2 * * * *  echo "No systemd here"
#
# For /home/user/.xsession-errors
#
# ---
0 */23 * * * [ $(du -k .xsession-errors | awk '{ print $1 }') -gt 2000 ] && tail -200 /home/$(whoami)/.xsession-errors > $
# ---

The above entry will keep the file under 2mb and when it grows over that limit it will clean up, keeping the last 200 lines.
2Mb of [.xsession-errors] is a lot of text.

eg:
Just now I see that my system's [.xsession-errors] file has 7249 lines and weighs in at a bare 784KiB.

Note:
I have looked at the glibberish that makes up the [.xsession-errors] file once or twice.
I could not make any sense from it and the system apparently worked properly.
And if it did not, I was never the wiser for it. 8^°

What it is useful for is to see just how much unfixed/crap code is routinely swept under the rug.
You know, all that [won't fix] stuff because [whatever].

The thing is that the main issue for most any Linux user is that the bloody file runs wild.
And if not checked, can grow to ridiculous sizes and cause problems.

Best,

A.

Last edited by Altoid (Today 18:51:44)

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