Soft Limits and Hard Limits

You can set both soft and hard limits. The system will not allow a user to exceed his or her hard limit. However, a system administrator may set a soft limit (sometimes referred to as a quota) which can be temporarily exceeded by the user. The soft limit must be less than the hard limit.

Once the user exceeds the soft limit, a timer begins. While the timer is ticking, the user is allowed to operate above the soft limit but cannot exceed the hard limit. Once the user goes below the soft limit, the timer gets reset. However, if the user's usage remains above the soft limit when the timer expires, the soft limit is enforced as a hard limit. By default, the soft limit timer is seven days.

The value of the timer is shown by the timeleft field in the repquota and quota commands.

For example, let's say a user has a soft limit of 10,000 blocks and a hard limit of 12,000 blocks. If the user's block usage exceeds 10,000 blocks and the timer is also exceeded (more than seven days), the user will not be able to allocate more disk blocks on that file system until his or her usage drops below the soft limit.