Each user disk (hard drive) on the cluster is shared by several hundred students and faculty members. Filling up the disk area where your home directory is located will cause serious problems for yourself and all of the other users who share that disk. None of the users will be able to save files, send e-mail, or do much of anything useful.
To prevent the disks from filling up, each user has been assigned a disk quota -- a maximum amount of disk space that they are allowed to use. The current "normal" quota on the cluster is 500 megabytes.
If you have a valid reason to use more than 500 megabytes of disk, please send e-mail with your request to support@Mines.EDU.
Note that in general, archiving files from your PC, storing music or video or personal image files is not considered a sufficient reason to increase your disk quota! Be aware that if you request an increase to your disk quota, the Computing Center system administrators will check what files you have, when they were created, etc.
Some of the problems that you may encounter if you have exceeded your disk quota on the cluster are:
To find out how much total disk space you have in use in
your home directory on the cluster, type
du -h
while logged in to your cluster account. The number
that is returned is the total number of megabytes used.
To find out how much disk space one of your subdirectories
is taking, type
du -sh <subdir>
(replace <subdir> with the name of the subdirectory you are
interested in, or with the character * to get subtotals for
all subdirectories, again in kilobytes).
If you want to know the size of individual files or the date
when they were last modified, type
ls -l <filename>
(replace <filename> as above, or leave it blank to find out
sizes and modification dates for all of the files in your
current directory - file sizes given by ls are in bytes, and
appear just before the modification date).
To remove a file, type
rm <filename>
To remove a subdirectory and all of its contents, type
rm -r <subdirectoryname>
To compress a large file that you don't use too frequently, type
compress <filename>
The compressed version of the file will be named filename.Z Compressing a file can save a lot of space in some cases and very little in others, depending on what kind of file you are compressing. Use the uncompress command to restore the file to its original form.
If the above commands do not appear to show you much disk in use, please send e-mail to support@Mines.EDU to get help finding out what is taking up disk space.