User home folder size limit

Question

I am trying to find anything on the web no success. Is there any way to limit size of home directory for user ? Or any directory ? The best would be by percentage for two users 45% and 45%. But by gigabytes will be fine as well.

Thank you so much.

Solution

• Open /etc/fstab with a commandline editor (vi, sed, nano) to add the usrquota and/or grpquota to the partition (depending on your needs: pick one or both)(and yes, it assumes you use a partition for it and in this case that would be /home/):

  • userquota is for users
  • grpquouta is for groups

• Create a file for user and/or group:

  touch /home/aquota.user
  touch /home/aquota.group
  

  • The files need to be owned by root and have 600 as permissions

    sudo chown root:root /home/aquota.user sudo chown root:root /home/aquota.group sudo chmod 600 /home/aquota.user sudo chmod 600 /home/aquota.group

• reboot or remount the partition.

• command quotaon -av will enable quota

• command edquota -u {user_id} will let you edit them where {user_id} is the id of the user. This will open vi for editing the quota.

  Setting the quota is done in "blocks" or "inodes" and there are 2 options:

  • soft: Max number of blocks/inodes a user may have on the partition before a warning is issued and a grace period countdown begins.
  • hard: Max number of blocks/inodes user may have on partition. (If set to zero then no limit is enforced on either of the options).

The best would be by percentage for two users 45% and 45%. But by gigabytes will be fine as well.

• Blocks are probably 4kB (stat -f . will show the blocksize on your system).
• Inodes means amount of files and directories.

Answer based on this how to. The link has a lot more information about commands related to this and explains it a bit more in depth.

Comments

[Edward Torvalds]

does this method requires /home/ dir to be mounted on separate partition?

[Rinzwind]

yes it needs a partition.