Any way to stop Steam from writing to log files in /var/log?

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Distribution: Debian/sid

So while I was watching the cutscene in Final Fantasy XII or when I left the game on overnight, Steam filled up about 1.6GB of log data to /var/log/syslog, /var/log/messages, and /var/log/user.log. I have no intention of increasing the log partition beyond 2GB as that is more than enough for my desktop machine. I even prevented the SystemD’s Journal from filling up the entire /var/log partition as well, so I went into logrotate.conf and changed from weekly to hourly. Now, this may not resolve the situation but I am trying to prevent Steam from logging to any of the log files in /var/log. “Hourly” is not ideal for logrotate, but since I have not had any intrusion attempts, I’m going to leave it on for now. I could go with “daily,” but if I do not know how to get Steam to write to the log files in /var/log, the same issue may occur.

Is there any way I can stop Steam from writing into /var/log partition? I mean, maybe redirect log writes to /dev/null unless I need to debug issues with Steam/Proton?

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Try wrapping the logs with logrotate

I don’t know if Steam writes to it’s own log or a shared log file. If it writes to it’s own log file, then modify the config so that the file wraps at a specific size.

Reference:

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As I said, Steam writes log data into the /var/log partition. If Steam could write about 1GB+ worth of worthless data into /var/log/syslog, /var/log/messages, and/or /var/log/user.log within an hour as a worst-case scenario, I’m afraid that’s not going to help.

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Have you considered using SELinux to block access to /var/* for Steam?

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Pardon my late reply. No, but I suppose I could use AppArmor to prevent Steam from writing to the /var/log folder. Maybe that might help. I’ll see if I can give it a try.

(Changed from “Tracking” to “Watching” in the notification settings. Not sure why the notification settings set it to “tracking” by default.)

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