Disk Quotas (Unix Power Tools, 3rd Edition)

15.11. Disk Quotas

No matter how much disk space you have, you will eventually run out. One way the system administrator can force users to clean up after themselves is to impose quotas on disk usage. Many Unixes have quota systems available: check your manual pages with a command like apropos quota.

If you're a user, how do quotas affect you? Sooner or later, you may find that you're over your quota. Quotas are maintained on a per-filesystem basis. They may be placed on disk storage (the number of blocks) and on inodes (the number of files). The quota system maintains the concept of hard and soft limits. When you exceed a soft limit, you'll get a warning (WARNING: disk quota exceeded), but you can continue to accumulate more storage. The warning will be repeated whenever you log in. At some point (i.e., after some number of sessions in which the storage stays above the soft limit), the system loses patience and refuses to allocate any more storage. You'll get a message like OVER DISK QUOTA: NO MORE DISK SPACE. At this point, you must delete files until you're again within the soft limit. Users are never allowed to exceed their hard limit. This design allows you to have large temporary files without penalty, provided that they do not occupy too much disk space long-term.

There may also be a quota on the number of files (i.e., inodes) that you can own per filesystem. It works exactly the same way; you'll get a warning when you exceed the soft limit; if you don't delete some files, the system will eventually refuse to create new files.

The quota command shows a user's quota on each filesystem where quotas have been set. With no option, it displays a line for each system where you're over quota. The -v option shows a line for each system where you have a quota. The output can be a bit confusing on systems with the automounter running, since it mounts things dynamically and uses symlinks to make things appear where you expect them, so the filesystem names may not match the directory names you're accustomed to:

$ quota
Over disk quota on /home/jpeek, remove 228K within 4.0 days
Over file quota on /home/jpeek, remove 13 files within 4.5 days
$ quota -v
Filesystem     usage  quota limit  timeleft  files  quota limit  timeleft
/export/users      0   8000  9000                0    600   750
/export/home9   8228   8000  9000  4.0 days    613    600   750  4.5 days

In this case, the automounter has clearly mounted my home directory on /export/home9, since that shows the same information that quota showed me in the first command.

-- ML and JP