Shell and DoC Systems

The Department of Computing gives you a certain quota of storage to use within your home directory. To see how much of this you’re currently using, you can use quota.

username@MACHINE:notes$ quota -s
Disk quotas for user username (uid 1234): 
     Filesystem  blocks   quota   limit   grace   files   quota   limit   grace
e4rne.doc.ic.ac.uk.:/export/users/u/username
                2262M  11719M  12696M           16854   60000   61000

The crucial line here is the last. The first three numbers give the amount of storage currently used, followed by the quota of storage that username has, followed by the hard limit. Currently, username has used 2262 megabytes of storage, of their 11,719 megabyte quota.

Your DoC account also imposes limits on the number of different files you can have within your home directory. The next three numbers show that username has 16,854 files, of their 60,000 file quota.

At some point—often when you’re running large experiments for coursework, or for your individual projects—you might find yourself pushing the limits of these quotas. It’s a good idea to check them periodically—if you go over, you might be unable to log in to your account!

Exercise 9

View your own quota, and understand the output.