How to Change the Soft Limit Default

By default, users can exceed the soft time limits for their quotas for one week. So, after a week of repeated violations of the soft time limits of either disk space quotas or inode quotas, the system prevents users from using any more inodes or disk blocks.

You can change the length of time that users can exceed their disk space quotas or inode quotas by using the edquota command.

1. Become superuser or assume an equivalent role.

   Roles contain authorizations and privileged commands. For more information about roles, see Configuring RBAC (Task Map) in System Administration Guide: Security Services.

2. Use the quota editor to create a temporary file that contains soft time limits.

   # edquota -t

   where the -t option specifies the editing of the soft time limits for each file system.

3. Change the time limits from 0 (the default) to the time limits that you specify. So, use numbers and the keywords month, week, day, hour, min, or sec.

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   Note –

   This procedure does not affect current quota violators.

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Example 7–8 Changing the Soft Limit Default

The following example shows the contents of the temporary file opened by the edquota command on a system where /export/home is the only mounted file system with quotas. The default value, 0, means that the default time limit of one week is used.

fs /export/home blocks time limit = 0 (default), files time limit = 0 (default)

The following example shows the same temporary file after the time limit for exceeding the blocks quota has been changed to 2 weeks. Also, the time limit for exceeding the number of files has been changed to 16 days.

fs /export/home blocks time limit = 2 weeks, files time limit = 16 days