Documentation - Harper
Getting Under Your Harper Quota
Please note: NSIT is no longer creating new accounts on harper. Individuals claiming or re-establishing their CNet accounts after the end of May 2009 will be unable to access harper.
Question:
My account complains that I'm over quota, and now it won't let me create or even compress files. How do I get under quota?
Short Answer:
Harper has a disk quota of 15 Megabytes. Once you are over that quota, you will begin to get warning messages. If you remain over that quota for more than one week, you will not be able to create any new files. This will keep you from using pine properly, and even keep you from compressing files, since that involves creating a new (compressed) file.
You will need to free up disk space in your account on harper. You can simply delete files, download them to a personal computer then delete them, or compress them. One way or another, though, you need to reduce your disk usage to below 15 MB.
Long Answer:
If your account is over quota, and you are unable to create files, there are a couple of things you can do to fix the problem. Note that if you are not particularly familiar with the Unix operating system, you should check the Unix docs available in our Unix index. Please refer to these documents for more information about the commands given below, and general use of Unix.
First, you can check the amount of disk space you are using in your account, by using the "du" command (for "disk usage"). the command
du -k
will list the amount of space used in kilobytes on harper in this format:
154 ./News
8806 ./mail
2260 ./myfiles
11292 .
First, each directory in your account will be shown, with the space used in kilobytes. The last entry is the total for your account. If the last number is greater than 15000, you will need to clear out space in your account. In the example above, there are 11.2 MB in use altogether in the account. There are 8.8 MB of files in the "mail" directory, and 2.2 MB in the "myfiles" directory.
To change to a particular directory, you can use the "cd" (change directory) command. "cd directory" will move to that directory. "cd" by itself will move you to your home directory, the same "place" you start at when you log into harper. If you change directories in Unix and end up not knowing where you are, you can just type in "cd" to get back where you started.
You can get more information about how much space is being used using the ls command. "/usr/ucb/ls -s" will give a listing of all files in a directory, showing size for each file. For example, the commands:
harper> cd mail
harper> /usr/ucb/ls -s
total 8806
892 sent-mail 1527 saved-messages-oct-1998
960 saved-messages 850 saved-messages-nov-1998
1433 saved-messages-aug-1998 487 saved-messages-dec-1998
1280 saved-messages-sep-1998 1139 saved-messages-jan-1999
harper> cd
harper>
Will show the contents of the mail directory, showing the size in kilobytes of each file, and the total size at the beginning. Now you know what files need dealing with.
To free up space, there are several possible actions.
Deleting files
First, and most simple, is just to delete the files. If you don't need the information in the files anymore, the command "rm" (remove) is what you want. At the harper prompt, you can type:
rm saved-messages-oct-1998
to delete the file "saved-messages-oct-1998".
Downloading files to a personal computer
If you wish to keep a copy of files that you are going to remove, the best option is usually to download a copy to your personal computer before deleting the files on harper. We recommend using SFTP to transfer files to and from harper.
After downloading the files, follow the instructions above to delete the files on harper.
Compressing files on harper
Another option is to compress the files on harper, to save disk space. If you are just compressing the files and leaving them in your harper account, probably your best option is the "gzip" command. Typing in the command "gzip filename" will compress the file, creating a new file named "filename.gz".
Note that as mentioned above, if you can't create files in your account, this command will not work properly. You will need to move the file to scratch space on harper, compress the file, then when there is enough free space in your account, you can move the compressed file back. The "mv" command will move files on harper: "mv filename new_location" will move the file named "filename" to the location given. You can use the "mkdir" command to create a temporary directory in the scratch directory "/scratch1".
harper> cd mail
harper> ls -s
total 8806
892 sent-mail 1527 saved-messages-oct-1998
960 saved-messages 850 saved-messages-nov-1998
1433 saved-messages-aug-1998 487 saved-messages-dec-1998
1280 saved-messages-sep-1998 1139 saved-messages-jan-1999
harper> mkdir /scratch1/my-files
harper> mv saved-messages-oct-1998 /scratch1/my-files
harper> cd /scratch1/my-files
harper> ls -s
total 1527
1527 saved-messages-oct-1998
harper> gzip saved-messages-oct-1998
harper> ls -s
total 652
652 saved-messages-oct-1998.gz
harper> mv saved-messages-oct-1998.gz ~/mail/
harper>
Notice finally that if you need to access a file that has been gzipped, you will need to unzip the file, using "gunzip". Note that this will return it to its original size, which may cause space problems again.
harper> ls -s
total 652
652 saved-messages-oct-1998.gz
total 1527
1527 saved-messages-oct-1998
harper> gunzip saved-messages-oct-1998.gz
harper> ls -s
total 1527
1527 saved-messages-oct-1998
harper>
For more information, see Backing Up Files in Unix.
Last updated: 6/23/09