Managing disk quotas in Linux

Table of Contents

1. Setting quotas
2. Enabling and disabling quotas
3. Checking and updating quotas
Summary

1. Setting quotas

Linux enables you to limit the amount of space that a user or group can consume on a given partition. To do this, you use the quotaon, quotaoff, and edquota commands.

You can configure a quota that includes the following properties for each user or group:

• soft limit
• grace period
• hard limit

soft limit

A soft limit is the initial maximum disk space a user or group is granted on a particular partition. When this limit is reached, the user or group members can still exceed the limit for a specified period of time, but will receive warning reminders.

grace period

The grace period is the amount of time during which a user can exceed the soft limit specified in a quota. Its default value is seven days, but you can alter this value.

hard limit

A hard limit is an absolute limit on disk usage. Once users or groups reach this limit, they can no longer create new files, even if they are still in a specified grace period for a soft limit.

You can edit quotas, and set hard and soft limits for users or groups, using the edquota command.

Hard and soft limits can have one of three values:

• 0 indicates that there are no space limits
• -1 instructs edquota to use default values
• a number greater than 0 specifying the limit, expressed in kilobytes

You can use the following options with the edquota command:

• -u username
• -g groupname
• -p username
• -t

-u username

The -u username option enables you to change a user’s quota limits.

-g groupname

The -g groupname option enables you to change a group’s quota limits.

-p username

The -p username option enables you to set quotas for many different users in one step, by copying one user’s quota information to other users.

-t

The