Users can have two types of disk space quota: home directory and project directory. The space in the home directory is permanent as long as the ID is valid. The space in the project directory is shared by the research group and allocated as a quota that is valid for a fixed period of time. The quotas are not applied to the other directories ($TMPDIR, $WRKDIR and $METAWRK).

You can check the quota status of the home directory and project directory by typing

quota -v
Disk quotas for user1 (uid 123):
Filesystem usage quota limit files quota limit
/mnt/mds/univ2
11504 20000 25000 1305 4000 5000
/mnt/mds/proj1
39256 256000 384000 322 64000 96000 

In this example, the user has 11504 kilobytes of files in the home directory and 39256 kilobytes of files in the project directory (usage). The quota in the home directory is 20000 kilobytes and in the project directory 256000 kilobytes (quota). The output also shows the number of files used (files) and the allocated limit.

You can check the size of the free disk space of the file system by typing

df [-k] [directory]

This will command a printout of the disk space use of the file system where the directory is located. Without arguments, the command will print out the data of all file systems. In the printout, the unit of disk space use is one disk sector, i.e. 512 bytes. Selector –k changes the unit into kilobytes.

To check the disk space used by a specific directory, type

du [-s] directory

This command prints out recursively the disk space used by the directory and its subdirectories. Selector -s prints out the sum total of the disk space used by the directory and its subdirectories. In the printout, the unit of the printed values is one disk sector, i.e., 512 bytes.