non-superuser chown(2)s considered harmful

A.V. Le Blanc zlsiial at uts.mcc.ac.uk
Thu Jan 17 00:55:33 AEST 1991


There may be other reasons for mounting a quota system than lack of
trust.  On some of the workstations which I manage there are
150 to 200 users and fairly limited filestore.  We have a simple
quota system because a small number of people can fill the filestore
by creating a few large files.  Moreover, many of our commonly used
software packages create large output files, which we must be certain
are archived or transferred or analysed or otherwise processed and
deleted as soon as possible.  Occasionally we must suppress quota
checking for one or another user, but this is better than having
full disks halt the system several times a day.

				A. V. Le Blanc
				ZLSIIAL at UK.AC.MCC.CMS



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