Joseph Herlant
version 1.0.0, 2014-07-06 : Initial version

To play with quotas on RHEL, you will need to use the quota package.

To check your kernel supports quotas, use:

grep -i config_quota /boot/config-$(uname -r)

  • quotaon /fs → To turn quota tracking on for the "/fs" file system (Automatically called on boot, but can’t be called until the quota files are created in the root directory of the quota file system.)

  • quotaoff -a → To turn quota tracking off for all file systems

  • edquota -u user01 → To edit the quota of user01

  • edquota -up user01 user02 user03 → To duplicate the quota configuration of user01 to user02 and user03

  • edquota -t → To edit the grace period of quota on each file system

  • quota → To display disk quota and usage

  • repquota -ugav → To summarize user and groups quotas for all (non-NFS) file systems

  • quotacheck -ugm -a → To scan all filesystems for disk usage, create, check and repair quota files

To specify that a filesystem is using quota, add usrquota and grpquota options to the filesystem in /etc/fstab. This will be taken in account at next mount (you can use the mount -o remount /fs to force a remount).

Or, to activate quota in a temporary way, just use:

mount -o usrquota,grpquota,remount /fs

Quota size are given in blocks of 1KB by default but you can specify units as usual (K, M, G and T).

If you don’t specify a grace period, the soft limit is the max. When a grace period is defined, the soft period acts like an alarm as long as the grace period is not reached and the hard limit is the max limit you can hit before the grace period expires.