Why does du and quota results not match? I have exceeded my disk quota on a system which I do not have root access. I tried removing old files but am still over. I tried runing `du` to find where I am using up all my space but it reports I am using very little. Results from `quota` /home/1234$ quota -s Disk quotas for user 1234 (uid 1234): Filesystem space quota limit grace files quota limit grace cslab:/home 4519M* 4096M 5120M 09:47 6155 0 0 From `du` /home/1234$ du -mad 1 ... 936 total I don't understand why `quota` says I am using 4.5GB while `du` only counts .9GB. I also checked for files I own in `/tmp` and there was 50MB worth of files there. _Where could the other 3.5GB of files be? Is it possible the quota system is wrong and needs reset?_

I believe there may be some files still held open by some processes. You can try to list them using,


lsof | grep username | grep deleted


A more better version would be to use,


lsof +L1 | grep username


However, sometimes there might be discrepancy in the output between `du` and `quota` which is explained in this link. Excerpt from the link,

> In Unix, the du and quota commands may report different values. The reason for this discrepancy is that the process which goes through the file system, checks quotas, and updates the usage tables only runs at specific times. Therefore, there will be periods between quota checks that the quota -v command will report incorrect disk usage. Use the du command for the most accurate information about the size of your files.