edquota

Additional Notes

edquota edits disk quotas for users and groups. It opens the quota settings in a text editor (as defined by EDITOR or VISUAL), allowing you to set soft and hard limits for blocks and inodes on each filesystem that has quotas enabled.

Quotas limit the amount of disk space a user or group can consume. The soft limit triggers a warning, while the hard limit is an absolute cap. For filesystems that support grace periods, users can exceed the soft limit for a limited time before it is enforced as a hard limit. edquota reads and writes the quota database files (aquota.user and aquota.group).

Syntax

edquota [options] user-or-group...

Parameters

• user-or-group: Username or group name to edit quotas for.

Common Options

• -u: Edit user quotas (default).
• -g: Edit group quotas.
• -p source-user: Duplicate the quota settings from the source user to the target users.
• -t: Edit the grace period settings.
• -T user | group: Edit the grace period for a specific user or group.
• -r filesystem: Operate only on the specified filesystem.
• -f filesystem: Operate only on the specified filesystem.
• -h: Print help.

Examples

sudo edquota alice

Edit disk quotas for user alice. Opens the default editor with current quota values.

sudo edquota -g developers

Edit group quotas for the developers group.

sudo edquota -p alice bob charlie

Copy alice's quota settings to bob and charlie.

sudo edquota -t

Edit the default grace periods for all filesystems with quotas.

Practical Notes

• Quotas must be enabled on the filesystem (using mount -o usrquota or usrquota in /etc/fstab) and initialized with quotacheck.
• The quota format in the editor is: filesystem blocks soft hard inodes soft hard.
• Blocks are typically 1 KB units. Set soft and hard limits in these units.
• A soft limit of 0 means no soft limit. A hard limit of 0 means no hard limit (unlimited).
• Use repquota to view current quota usage in tabular form.
• After editing quotas, they take effect immediately; no service restart is needed.