"du -shm ." and "quota -s" information are not matching for particular user?

Question

when du -cshm . is run from home directory of user, the below is the output.

 [user@host ~]$ du -cshm .
 2859    .
 2859    total

and when quota -s command is run, below is the output.

[user@host ~]$ quota -s
Disk quotas for user user (uid 1234): 
 Filesystem  blocks   quota   limit   grace   files   quota   limit   grace
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/home1/users
             15505M  16602M  17579M           26714       0       0

There is a huge difference from 2.8GB to 15-16GB(du to quota), can anyone please suggest how to resolve this.

(I have check empty folder, deleted trash but still quota show 15gb)

quota includes unlinked-but-still-open files. du won't spot those, because they are not referenced from any reachable directory. - see Why does du and quota results not match? — Toby Speight, Aug 17 '15 at 10:23

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 17 '15 at 08:47

The quota is applied file-system wide, so likely the user has files someplace outside of his/her home directory. For example, are there shared git repositories somewhere, or a mail spool on the same file system?

Also, you don't say much about the type of file system. Some fancier file systems (like on a netapp box) maintain daily or hourly snapshots as configured by the system administrator, so you will need to wait for those to expire.

"du -shm ." and "quota -s" information are not matching for particular user?

1 Answers1