Scope of the topic
This topic helps troubleshooting a quota issue due to too many files. Another topic already covers how to troubleshoot a quota issue when too much space is used.
Note that you could experience both problem at the same time.
First step: find out how many files you have
The df-ulhpc -i command displays the inode quota (i.e., your maximum allowed number of files) of all your main folders (home, scratch, projects…). The command can only be run on the access nodes, i.e. not on a worker node.
After running the df-ulhpc -i command, I see this:
Directory Used Soft quota Hard quota Grace period
--------- ---- ---------- ---------- ------------
/home/users/jschleich 1100000 1000000 1100000 expired
/mnt/lscratch/ 314 1000000 1100000 none
/work/projects/dummy 930248 2500000 2600000 none
Here we can see that my home folder contains too many files and I should delete some of them.
For more information about quotas, check our related ULHPC documentation.
Second step: find out where are those files
You can adapt and execute the script below to rapidly discover which folders are the main culprits for your exceeded quota:
find /change/with/your/folder -maxdepth 1 -type d -print0 | \
while IFS= read -d '' dir; \
do \
echo "$(find "$dir" | wc -l) $dir"; \
done | \
sort -nr
This script considers all the direct sub-folders (hidden or not) of the provided folder and count all the files recursively.