Re: language bindings (fs-independent quotas)

[Alan Barrett <apb%cequrux.com@localhost>]

On Fri, 18 Nov 2011, David Holland wrote:
> The proposed standard format for quotas is an ordinary columnar 
> text file. The reason language bindings came up is that Manuel 
> was complaining, somewhat oddly, that it's hard to handle these 
> in Perl.

Assuming that there's no need to handle fields with embedded 
spaces, perl's split() function will DTRT.

> And actually, language bindings are probably a good thing 
> anyway; if you have an installation with 50,000 users and you 
> want to frob their quotas from a Perl script, forking 50,000 
> edquota processes is probably not the best approach.

Oh my, I missed the part of the edquota man page where it says "a 
temporary file is created for each user".  Why can't it just create 
a single temporary file with a text table of all quotas?

By the way, I still haven't figured out how to test any of this 
quota stuff.  "quotaon /" followed by "edquota -f /" does nothing 
(no error message, and no useful result).  Using the device name 
"/dev/cgd1a" instead of the file system name "/" does not help.

--apb (Alan Barrett)