Restrict Directory Size

Question

I'm installing a program on my Linux server and it stores data locally for a week. However, there is an error that can occur sometimes that will keep it from deleting the data.

To safeguard against this when I installed it on a Unix server I just create a new filesystem of the specified size. However, the filesystem on my linux server was created to have the full partition. Is there some way to set the maximum size for a directory?

Additionally if these was free space in the partition, would it be better to create a new filesystem, or use the above restrictions.

Thanks, Alex

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 20 '21 at 13:54

4

I'm not sure of a way to limit the size of a single directory. You could create a new user, assign a quota to them, and then run the process under that user, but I'm guessing that's not what you're after.

As you hint at, you can create a filesystem as a "file" and mount it as the output directory for this app. This would ensure it never spills over to your regular filesystem:

dd if=/dev/zero of=~/disk_image_file count=$size_in_blocks
mkfs -t ext3 -q ~/disk_image_file
mkdir -p ~/mnt/app1/log
mount -o loop=/dev/loop0 ~/disk_image_file ~/mnt/app1/log

edited Jan 20 '21 at 13:54

Andrew Schulman

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answered Jan 21 '10 at 16:08

Yeah. I was figuring that if no one at work was suggesting it, it probably didn't exist, but it was worth a shot. Thanks for the code. -Alex – Buzkie Jan 21 '10 at 16:17
Thx. See also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8148715/how-to-set-limit-on-directory-size-in-linux#8148831 and http://souptonuts.sourceforge.net/quota_tutorial.html. – Jérôme Aug 28 '16 at 20:11

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 21 '10 at 15:59

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You're looking for quotas. Yes, it is entirely possible to implement quotas on most if not all unix filesystems.

Here's what you should read: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Quota.html You shouldn't need to do any kernel config. Any vaguely modern system will likely have this enabled already by the distribution.

Come back if you have problems.

answered Jan 21 '10 at 15:59

dotplus

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Thanks for the suggestion, I was looking into that while waiting for answers. The main problem with quotas is I can't be sure what user the program is running as. In addition, it defaults to run as root, and if I'm deploying to a machine with shared root, I don't want to put a quota on root. – Buzkie Jan 21 '10 at 16:08

Restrict Directory Size

2 Answers2