Change of historical behavior

Dax Kelson dax at gurulabs.com
Thu Apr 26 00:19:52 UTC 2007


Just a FYI...

While updating some courseware I noticed a change in decades old UNIX
behavior on RHEL5/FC6. The behavior may not be super important, but I
wouldn't be surprised if somebody, somewhere gets bit by it.

The change is as follows.

Previously with disk quotas enabled if your hard block quota was reached
(or you were over your soft and the time had expired) but your
file/inode quota was not reached, you could still create empty files.

This is no longer the case. Observe:

$ quota
Disk quotas for user guru (uid 500): 
     Filesystem  blocks   quota   limit   grace   files   quota   limit   grace
      /dev/sda8    2048*      0    2048              11       0       0        
$ touch /tmp/newfile
touch: cannot touch `/tmp/newfile': Disk quota exceeded

My initial suspicion was that this is a side effect of RHEL5/FC6
mounting all filesystems with the acl and user_xattr options (done via
the default mount options field in the filesystem's super block),
however with testing this appears not to be case.

This came up because the lab exercise I was updating had a step along
the lines of "...now that you are 'over' quota run the command "touch
anewfile". Can you explain why that still works?...".

Dax Kelson
Guru Labs




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list