13.2. Managing Disk Quotas

If quotas are implemented, they need some maintenance — mostly in the form of watching to see if the quotas are exceeded and making sure the quotas are accurate. Of course, if users repeatedly exceeds their quotas or consistently reaches their soft limits, a system administrator has a few choices to make depending on what type of users they are and how much disk space impacts their work. The administrator can either help the user determine how to use less disk space or increase the user's disk quota if needed.

13.2.1. Enabling and Disabling

It is possible to disable quotas without setting them to be 0. To turn all user and group quotas off, use the following command:
quotaoff -vaug
If neither the -u or -g options are specified, only the user quotas are disabled. If only -g is specified, only group quotas are disabled.
To enable quotas again, use the quotaon command with the same options.
For example, to enable user and group quotas for all file systems, use the following command:
quotaon -vaug
To enable quotas for a specific file system, such as /home, use the following command:
quotaon -vug /home
If neither the -u or -g options are specified, only the user quotas are enabled. If only -g is specified, only group quotas are enabled.