University of Southern California

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Quota Commands

Introduction

All ITS UNIX accounts have a quota for the amount of disk space you may use and another quota for the number of files you can create. Every account has these quotas assigned at three different locations: your home directory, your mail spool, and the /tmp directory (which is located in /var).

For more information on mail quotas, please see ITS's FAQ at Managing Your Email Quota.

Determining Your Quota and Usage

To find out what your quota and usage is for each of these areas, type:

You will see something like this:

Disk quotas for consult:

Filesystem usage quota limit timeleft files quota limit
/var 0 20000 20000   0 500 600
/tmp 0 50000 51000   0 100 150
/auto/home-scf-11 44842 50000 51000   407 10000 11000

The quota information is divided into several columns. The first column consists of the filesystem information. This shows the directories to which the quota command is applied.

The second through fifth columns consist of usage, quota, limit, and timeleft. The first three show the amount of disk space (in kilobytes) that is in use and is allowed. Timeleft shows the amount of time you have left to decrease your disk usage, if you are over quota.

The sixth through ninth columns consist of files, quota, limit, and timeleft. This shows the number of files that are currently owned and are allowed for the account.

The usage and files columns shows the number of kilobytes and files that your account is currently using, respectively. The size shown in these columns cannot exceed the limit column. When your account exceeds the size shown in the quota column, you will have 7 days to bring your account back under the quota. The days left will be shown in the timeleft column. After 7 days, you will no longer be able to add files to your account ("writing" to your account) until you bring it under the quota.

To see if you are over quota without listing your usage, quotas and limits, type:

If you are over your quota, you will get a message like the following:

To recursively see the size of each file and subdirectory in the current directory, type:

To see the size of each subdirectory in the current directory, type:

Last updated:
February 04, 2011

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