[tlug] Disparity between quota and du output

[Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>]

On a FreeBSD system, I have observed a situation where there
is a discrepancy of more than 10 megabytes between the usage
reported by du and the usage reported by quota, like so:

Disk quotas for user <removed>
     Filesystem   usage   quota   limit   grace   files   quota   limit   grace
          /<removed>       9    1000    1024               9       0       0        
           /<removed>  108516  150000  153600            1779       0       0        
#	du -skLc -I <removed>
93884	.
93884	total

The <removed> directory in the du command is not counted in quotas
and contains 28,239 1K blocks.

The <removed> directories in the quota command were removed just to
make myself look paranoid :-)

There are small discepancies (a few hundred bytes at most) for
users with similar amounts of data, but nothing like this.

So far I haven't been able to find what is causing this discrepancy.
Any ideas on what to look for?  Someone suggested that du and quota
calculate this number differently, but that doesn't sound plausible
on the surface, and even if it did, I would then expect it to
apply uniformly to all users on that box.  It doesn't.

TIA,

Jonathan