Linux Directory Quota

This arose out of the need to place a size quota on a directory without having to resort to quota software or manual usage checking. It utilizes Linux virtual filesystem support to do the trick. The following assumes we want a ~100MB quota on a directory.

• Make a mount point

mkdir -p /mnt/quotadir

• Create an image file for the virtual file system

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/quota.img bs=1024 count=100000

• Format the drive

mkfs.ext3 /mnt/quota.img

• Mount the drive

mount -o loop /mnt/quota.img /mnt/quotadir

• A permanent fstab entry would be

/mnt/quota.img   /mnt/quota       ext3    loop            1 2