Acutally I already tried that quota -v user and found that he has already exceeded his limit. Also I confirmed this on the filer as well using quota report directory.
The reason why I do not simply increase his quota, is because we do not allow users to create files beside his/her home dir. I need to find out why this is happening and fix it.
Thanks for your comment though.
Daniel Jung
I can think of several common scenarios where a user ends up owning files outside their home directory.
If superuser uses tar to "untar" an archive file, then tar preserves the original owner of the files. So let's suppose you download a big tar archive from some web site and the files in the archive are all owned by uid N. And then by coincidence you also have a user with uid N. When superuser un-tars the archive, this creates a whole lot of files owned by N.
Similar things can happen with other file archivers such as cpio, dump/restore, etc.
Also, if superuser uses tar or cpio or rsync or "cp -r -p" to copy files from one user's directory to another, the original file owner is preserved.
Perhaps superuser got careless with "chown -R" and inadvertently changed ownership of a bunch of files to the user. When you chown a file from one user to another, the disk space totals for both users are adjusted accordingly.
And finally, a user can open up any directory he owns with chmod 777. So if I open up one of my directories like this, then anyone else can create files in that directory, but they own them, not me. So their quota gets charged, not mine.
I suggest going to the top of the volume and running:
find . -user username -print
which will find all files owned by the user. Then you will be able to figure out what happened.
Steve Losen scl@virginia.edu phone: 434-924-0640
University of Virginia ITC Unix Support