Solution:

On the Prism system, every user has a home directory. Your home directory contains all files that you own and is where you will be placed when you log into acme. There are a number of filesystems that are used to store home directories, but you will only be given space on one of them.

Log in to acme.gatech.edu and type: quota -v

You should see something similar to this:

Disk quotas for gt9999z (uid 0000):
Filesystem     usage  quota  limit    timeleft  files  quota  limit    timeleft
/fuse3             0      1      1                  0      0      0            
/tnt4              0      1      1                  0      0      0            
/fuse1             0      1      1                  0      0      0            
/fuse2             0      1      1                  0      0      0            
/tnt3            108  10000  20000                  8      0      0            
/fuse4             0      1      1                  0      0      0            
/tnt1              0      1      1                  0      0      0            
/match1            0      1      1                  0      0      0            
/tnt2              0      1      1                  0      0      0            
/match3            0      1      1                  0      0      0            
/match2            0      1      1                  0      0      0            
/match4            0      1      1                  0      0      0  

We are only concerned with the first five columns. Here is a description of each.

Filesystem	The name of the filesystem.
usage (KB)	The amount of space (in kilobytes) you are currently using on that filesystem.
quota (KB)	The amount of space you are allowed to use on that filesystem (though you can exceed this amount for 7 days). You will only have files stored where you see a quota greater than 1 (which, you will notice, is only one filesystem).
limit (KB)	The amount of space you cannot exceed. Usually, limit = quota × 2.
timeleft	If your usage exceeds your quota, this column tells you how much time you have left to reduce it. If you do not reduce your usage within 7 days, you will see EXPIRED in this column. When the time has expired, no more files can be created or enlarged on that filesystem.

If you have exceeded the quota for your home directory, here's what you can do about it. The easiest way to diagnose this problem is to list all of your files and sort them from smallest to largest. You can do this fairly easily using the du (disk usage) and sort commands.

First, make sure you are in your home directory by typing:

cd ~

Now, list and sort the files by typing:

du -ark | sort -n

The results will probably scroll off of the screen, but you usually only need to see the last few lines anyway. The output should look something like this:

2       ./public_html
3       ./.addressbook.lu
3       ./.sh_history
4       ./.ssh
7       ./mail
8       ./.elm/elmrc
8       ./.elm/elmrc.old
10      ./.pine-debug2
10      ./.pine-debug4
11      ./.pine-debug1
11      ./.pine-debug3
15      ./.pinerc
17      ./.elm
8200    ./huge_file
8310    .

The '.' at the beginning of each file name represents the current directory. Notice that in addition to showing the usage for files, you will also see the total usage for directories. For example, the last line with only a '.' represents the total for your home directory. You will usually find that about 1-4 files are taking up almost all of your space. In this example, the user has 10000 KB of space and huge_file is using 8200 KB of it. The solution is to remove these large files if you don't need them any more.

To remove a file, type rm /path/filename. In our example, this would be:

rm ./huge_file

You can always check to see if you have removed enough by typing "quota -v" again. The tricky part can be deciding if you need to keep a file or not. If you're not sure, you should contact OIT's Customer Support Center for advice.

Feel free to submit a request for help for any of the following reasons: