Home Directory Over Quota

The number one cause of home directory quota issues is browser cache and failure to empty Recycle Bin (Trash) in the file manager.

You can check your quota by running the ‘quota’ or ‘quota -s’ (-s for human readable) command in a Terminal on any NMR Linux system. It is best to run this command on your local desktop and not shared servers like gate or mlsc-login because it checks every filesystem mounted and shared servers always have a ton of file systems mounted. To see what is using the most space in your home directory, run:

cd ~ 
du -sh .??* * | sort -h

You can change directory into your large subdirs and run the same du line to drill down into what is really using all your space.

cd .cache
du -sh .??* * | sort -h

If you reach a condition where you cannot write to your home directory, you will not be able to login to the Linux GUI desktops such as VNC and NoMachine. When this happens, at your desktop console press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to go to text login and login (or login remotely with ssh). Run ‘quota -s’ to see how far you are over quota. Delete or move files to get comfortably under quota. Then logout and press Ctrl-Alt-F7 to go back to the GUI login.

If you want to preserve a directory such as ~/.conda, ~/.cache/pip and ~/.local/share/python* you may symlink these to group storage volumes with more space after moving them.

Example:

mv ~/.cache/pip/ /local_mount/space/hostname/1/users/user/example/
ln -s /local_mount/space/hostname/1/users/user/example/pip ~/.cache/pip

Then you will see a link within the ~/.cache directory

pip -> /local_mount/space/hostname/1/users/user/example/pip

Other common directory you may want to move/link like this are ~/.vscode, ~/.nv, ~/.singularity, and ~/.apptainer (the later two can be handled by setting proper environment variables as describe here).

One should go to settings in Firefox and/or Chrome and change the amount of space allowed to cache.

You can safely delete old logs in ~/.vnc if you are sure you are not running any current VNC servers on those machines.  Same with ~/.nx

You can generally safely delete large *cache*.xml files in your ~/.matlab.  In fact deleting all of ~/.matlab will just remove various GUI settings and history.  Any permanent settings you want should be put in ~/matlab/startup.m

Also MATLAB will create a runtime cache with names like ~/.mcrCache9.0.  It is safe to delete these if MATLAB is not running.  You can set MCR_CACHE_ROOT  environment variable to redirect MATLAB to create these elsewhere.

Recycle Bin will be in either ~/.Trash or ~/.local/share/Trash depending on version.  It is safe to just remove them at the Terminal command line.  Especially for large deletes, we just doing it on the command line rather than the GUI file manager.

The way to delete files on the Terminal command line is using the ‘rm’ command.  Use ‘rm -r’ to delete whole directories and their contents recursively (be very careful).