Deleting files when “Disk quota exceeded”

Disk quota exceeded

If the user reaches the quota limit, the filesystem that carries home directory of users on High Performance Computing (HPC) servers (called ZFS) does not let users delete files. So the following command would not work:

The reason is that the system needs to transiently write metadata to the system before performing the deletion process. The solution is the following commands:

The first line overwrite a null file on the file you would like to delete. The second line deletes that file. Now you should have enough quota to perform more deletions at your user directory.