Quota
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File system quotas refer to how much disk space a given user is allowed to have on a given partition. Quotas are established using the quota command. The purpose of quotas is to keep the users from taking up more disk space than they should properly have - for example, on a large multi-user system.
QuickStart
- To set a quota you may have to - depending on your distribution - install the quota package first. To do this e.g. under SUSE Linux open a console and issue
yast -i quota
- Now you will need to make sure the partition you want to set a quota on is mounted with quotas enabled. For example if you want to set a quota onto the / partition you must remount this with the option usrquota or grpquota. To achieve this you could add usrquota to your /etc/fstab like this:
/dev/sda / ext4 acl,usrquota,user_xattr 1 1
and then reboot.
- initialize the quota:
# quotacheck -F vfsold -m -c /
- set a quota for a user named john:
edquota john
You will get to a new screen where you can set the quota for that user. It will look like this:
Disk quotas for user john (uid 1000): Filesystem blocks soft hard inodes soft hard /dev/sda1 104888 0 0 1117 1 1 ~ ~
Note that above we have set a quota of 1 for soft inode limit and hard inode limit.
To activate the quota use
quotaon
- now test it out:
# su - john $ touch test $ touch test2 sda1: write failed, user file limit reached. touch: cannot touch ‘test2’: Disk quota exceeded
TroubleShooting
Has no quota enabled
# quotaon / quotaon: Mountpoint (or device) / not found or has no quota enabled.
Cannot find //aquota.user
# quotaon / quotaon: cannot find //aquota.user on /dev/sda1 [/]