Our System Administrators told me that my home account is over the 10GB quota on our cluster, but I executed the ls -l command and I can see only a few small files that do not exceed more than 3GB all together. How is it that am I exceeding the quota?
This often happens when there are some large files (or many smaller files) in so called dot directories.
Try to execute the following command to see what files you have in all directories (including hidden directories):
du -hs .[^.]* *
On Linux systems, there is a nicer way to find the particular directory that may have a large file (or files) that hog your quota. From your home directory invoke:
du -S | sort -rnk 1 | head -30
(That is with capital -S, not -s). This will print out the usage of your individual directories WITHOUT including the sum of the disk usage of their child subdirectories and sort them descending in size, and print the first 30 (i.e. the largest offenders). Usually this will get you to the biggest hogging directory right away. Maybe in that directory there is a large temporary file, or maybe a core dump … things that users don’t frequently check for.