About activating or reinitializing quotas

Reinitialization causes the quotas file to be scanned and all quotas for that volume to be recalculated. You use the quota on command to activate or reinitialize quotas. Knowing how quota initialization works can help you manage your quotas less disruptively.

The following list outlines some facts you should know about activating or reinitializing quotas:

Changes to the quotas file do not take effect until either quotas are reinitialized or the quota resize command is issued.
You activate or reinitialize quotas for only one volume at a time.
Your quotas file does not need to be free of all errors to activate quotas. Invalid entries are reported and skipped. If the quotas file contains any valid entries, quotas are activated.
Quota reinitialization can take some time, during which storage system data is available, but quotas are not enforced for the specified volume.
Quota reinitialization is performed asynchronously by default; other commands can be performed while the reinitialization is proceeding in the background.
Note: Errors or warnings from the reinitialization process could be interspersed with the output from other commands.
Quota reinitialization can be invoked synchronously with the -w option; this is useful if you are reinitializing from a script.
Errors and warnings from the reinitialization process are logged to the console as well as to /etc/messages.
Quota activation persists across halts and reboots. You should not activate quotas in the /etc/rc file.

Parent topic: About quotas

Related concepts

When you can use resizing

When a full quota reinitialization is required