Setting User and Group Quotas on a ZFS File System

You can set a user quota or a group quota by using the zfs userquota or zfs groupquota commands, respectively. For example:

$ zfs create students/compsci
$ zfs set userquota@student1=10G students/compsci
$ zfs create students/labstaff
$ zfs set groupquota@labstaff=20GB students/labstaff

Display the current user quota or group quota as follows:

$ zfs get userquota@student1 students/compsci
NAME              PROPERTY            VALUE               SOURCE
students/compsci  userquota@student1  10G                 local
$ zfs get groupquota@labstaff students/labstaff
NAME               PROPERTY             VALUE                SOURCE
students/labstaff  groupquota@labstaff  20G                  local

You can display general user or group disk space usage by querying the following properties:

$ zfs userspace students/compsci
TYPE        NAME      USED  QUOTA
POSIX User  root      350M   none
POSIX User  student1  426M    10G
$ zfs groupspace students/labstaff
TYPE         NAME      USED  QUOTA
POSIX Group  labstaff  250M    20G
POSIX Group  root      350M   none

To identify individual user or group disk space usage, query the following properties:

$ zfs get userused@student1 students/compsci
NAME              PROPERTY           VALUE              SOURCE
students/compsci  userused@student1  550M               local
$ zfs get groupused@labstaff students/labstaff
NAME               PROPERTY            VALUE               SOURCE
students/labstaff  groupused@labstaff  250                 local

The user and group quota properties are not displayed by using the zfs get all dataset command, which displays a list of all of the other file system properties.

You can remove a user quota or group quota as follows:

$ zfs set userquota@student1=none students/compsci
$ zfs set groupquota@labstaff=none students/labstaff

User and group quotas on ZFS file systems provide the following features:

A user quota or group quota that is set on a parent file system is not automatically inherited by a descendent file system.
However, the user or group quota is applied when a clone or a snapshot is created from a file system that has a user or group quota. Likewise, a user or group quota is included with the file system when a stream is created by using the zfs send command, even without the -R option.
Unprivileged users can only access their own disk space usage. The root user or a user who has been granted the userused or groupused privilege, can access everyone's user or group disk space accounting information.
The userquota and groupquota properties cannot be set on ZFS volumes, on a file system prior to file system version 4, or on a pool prior to pool version 15.

Enforcement of user and group quotas might be delayed by several seconds. This delay means that a user might exceed the user quota before the system notices that the user is over quota and refuses additional writes with the EDQUOT error message.

You can use the legacy quota command to review user quotas in an NFS environment, for example, where a ZFS file system is mounted. Without any options, the quota command only displays output if the user's quota is exceeded. For example:

$ zfs set userquota@student1=10m students/compsci
$ zfs userspace students/compsci
TYPE        NAME      USED  QUOTA
POSIX User  root      350M   none
POSIX User  student1  550M    10M
$ quota student1
Block limit reached on /students/compsci

If you reset the user quota and the quota limit is no longer exceeded, you can use the quota -v command to review the user's quota. For example:

$ zfs set userquota@student1=10GB students/compsci
$ zfs userspace students/compsci
TYPE        NAME      USED  QUOTA
POSIX User  root      350M   none
POSIX User  student1  550M    10G
$ quota student1
$ quota -v student1
Disk quotas for student1 (uid 102):
Filesystem     usage  quota  limit    timeleft  files  quota  limit    timeleft
/students/compsci
563287 10485760 10485760           -      -      -      -           -