Installation guide

Chapter 15. Disk Quotas

This command displays the existing quota for the group in the text editor:

Disk quotas for group devel (gid 505):

Filesystem blocks soft hard inodes soft hard

/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol02 440400 0 0 37418 0 0

Modify the limits, then save the file.

To verify that the group quota has been set, use the command:

quota -g devel

15.1.6. Setting the Grace Period for Soft Limits

If a given quota has soft limits, you can edit the grace period (i.e. the amount of time a soft limit can be

exceeded) with the following command:

edquota -t

This command works on quotas for inodes or blocks, for either users or groups. While other edquota

commands operate on quotas for a particular user or group, the -t option operates on every file

system with quotas enabled.

15.2. Managing Disk Quotas

If quotas are implemented, they need some maintenance — mostly in the form of watching to see if

the quotas are exceeded and making sure the quotas are accurate.

Of course, if users repeatedly exceed their quotas or consistently reach their soft limits, a system

administrator has a few choices to make depending on what type of users they are and how much disk

space impacts their work. The administrator can either help the user determine how to use less disk

space or increase the user's disk quota.

15.2.1. Enabling and Disabling

It is possible to disable quotas without setting them to 0. To turn all user and group quotas off, use the

following command:

quotaoff -vaug

If neither the -u or -g options are specified, only the user quotas are disabled. If only -g is specified,

only group quotas are disabled. The -v switch causes verbose status information to display as the

command executes.

To enable quotas again, use the quotaon command with the same options.

For example, to enable user and group quotas for all file systems, use the following command:

quotaon -vaug

To enable quotas for a specific file system, such as /home, use the following command:

quotaon -vug /home

If neither the -u or -g options are specified, only the user quotas are enabled. If only -g is specified,

only group quotas are enabled.