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1. What is quota?

1.1 What is quota for?

Quota allows you to specify limits on two aspects of disk storage: the number of inodes a user or a group of users may possess; and the number of disk blocks that may be allocated to a user or a group of users.

The idea behind quota is that users are forced to stay under their disk consumption limit, taking away their ability to consume unlimited disk space on a system. Quota is handled on a per user, per file system basis. If there is more than one file system which a user is expected to create files, then quota must be set for each file system separately. Various tools are available for you to administer and automate quota policies on your system.

1.2 Current Status of Quota on Linux

Currently, there are some major changes in the way quota works. There are two different setups. The tools works the same, but there's a difference in used files. This document describes the setup and operation of the _new_ quota setup. As the new setup of quota is not in the regular kernel source, this setup needs some patching. We will describe this patching and installation of the linuxquota package. If you already have the quota software installed on your system, you may or may not have to install this patch and package. You can email me if you have any questions about this. I'll try to include a overview of Linux distro's and it's implications in a later version of this document.

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