You can discover your quota with the showquota command. For example:

% showquota
Used 2.1M; Quota 256.0M

This says that your (actually joe's) current usage is 2.1M. (An “M” is a megabyte: about a million bytes, or characters, of disk space.) Your quota is 256.0M (256 megabytes).

The system will not allow you to create or add to your files so that your current usage would exceed your quota. Depending on the programs you're running, you may (or may not) get error messages (of varying wording) notifying you of quota problems.

Users who need additional disk space for short-term storage of large files should usually use the “scratch” directory /var/tmp available on each system. Files in the scratch directory do not count against user quota. However, as the `tmp' name implies, any files you put in the scratch areas should be strictly tmporary. The area is not backed up to tape, and an automatic program cleans old files out periodically. For more information on the scratch directory, see this section.

Generally, you'll want to stay comfortably under quota; exceeding your quota can put your saved data at risk.

However, if you do ever find yourself flirting with quota-disaster, if you're careful and cool-headed, you can often pull yourself out of potentially bad situations.

For example, if you are in an editor when you get a quota-exceeded message, you may be unable to save your edited file in your own area. All is not lost, however: you should (a) tell the editor to write your file in the /var/tmp directory, (b) delete or compress files in your area to get below quota; (c) log out; (d) log back in again; and, finally (e) copy the file from /var/tmp back into your own directory.

For example, the vi command to write a file named poli.c in the /var/tmp directory would be

:w /var/tmp/poli.c

Then, after you've gone under quota, logged out, and logged back in, you can then bring the file back by typing the Unix command:

% cp /var/tmp/poli.c poli.c

(Of course, you want to be very sure you log back into the same machine. The /var/tmp directories on different machines are on different disks.)

Most users have a “base” quota of 256 megabytes, which we hope is adequate to accommodate the vast majority of normal everyday disk storage. (For reference purposes, the text version of the King James Bible, Testaments both Old and New, is about 4.4 megabytes.)

Requests for increased quota (for some reason nobody ever requests a decreased quota) should be made via e-mail to <nancye.jenkins@unh.edu>. This is called an “override request” because it replaces our default quota-calculation algorithm.

Your override request should include:

The /tmp and /var/tmp directories are for temporary storage of files. Many system programs expect to be able to create files in these directories, and fail miserably if they are full. This can be inconvenient to all users of the system.

The system runs a tmp-cleaning program daily to automatically enforce the following rules:

Technical note: The age of a file or directory will be determined by the time its contents were last accessed. (For unix geeks: atime.)