How can I clean up my locker and get below my quota?

When you're having trouble being over or near quota, the following things may be of help to you.

helpquota

The helpquota program in the consult locker will try to help you figure out what is using up your quota, and will look at many of the things described below. It will also offer you the option of compressing files or directories that you want to keep. To run it, type:

It's a menu-driven program that should be fairly easy to use. The most commonly used features of helpquota are:

• Listing the largest files in a particular directory
• Listing the largest files anywhere in your locker
• Listing files that are generally considered expungeable

Note that helpquota can also be used on lockers other than your home directory by specifying the locker name on the command line:

Other tips

• If you have been using "delete" to mark files for deletion, run "purge" to really remove them.

• Determine what's taking up the most space in your account. While helpquota can do this, you can also use the following command, which will list all the files and directories in the directory that you're in, sorted by their total size. (Run this in your root home directory first, then in subdirectories if you need to)

• Compress large files. There are a number of options available on athena for compression; two are described below.

If you are over quota, you will be unable to create the compressed file in your account; in this case, you should either do the compressing in a local directory such as /var/tmp, or get under quota by deleting unneeded files first.

• • The gzip command, in the sipb and gnu lockers, has a good compression rate. The following command:
    joeuser@athena:~$ gzip -9 filename

    $body

    Note: Be sure to fill in the correct information for filename.
    will create filename.gz and remove filename. You can uncompress a .gz file using the "gunzip" command.

• • The zip command can create recursive zip archives of files and directories, and can also be unzipped by the built-in unzip functions of MacOS and Windows XP.
    joeuser@athena:~$ zip zipfile filename

    $body

    Note: Be sure to fill in the correct information for zipfile and filename.
    will create zipfile.zip from filename, and
    joeuser@athena:~$ zip -r zipfile directoryname

    $body

    Note: Be sure to fill in the correct information for zipfie and directoryname.
    will create zipfile.zip containing all the contents of directoryname. Note that zip does not delete the old file; you must do that yourself.

• Consider particularly removing files of the following types, as they are frequently unneeded.