In almost all areas of user management, we have to assign disk space quotas of some description in order to give the responsibility of disk space management back to the user. If we do not, then the user would never know the struggles that we have to face in providing them with unlimited disk space. Allowing the user to see that their space is filling up then may prompt them to carry out a little housekeeping.

In Linux, disk quotas are applied to the mount points; if you want to limit a user's space in their home directory, then the /home directory will need to be in its own partition. If it is part of the root filesystem, then a user's space will be restricted to all directories within that partition.

Quota restrictions are implemented using tools from the quota package. You can use the yum command to verify that it is installed:

$ yum list quota

If the output of the command indicates that it is available rather than installed, then install the quota with:

# yum install quota