Resolved: See "However" at the end of the question for details.
I've managed to hose my login to a Unix box. I don't have an easy way of contacting the administrator, so I'd like to resolve it myself ideally. I don't have root access (that would be too easy).
Per the title, I've managed to create a large file through an app spamming stdout, which I now can't remove. rm -f doesn't work, nor does cat /dev/null >| $file, nor truncate -s 0 $file. Errors are akin to the following, for everything I've tried.
tr08[~]$ cat /dev/null >| wordlist.txt
-bash: wordlist.txt: Disk quota exceeded
Output from quota is unhelpful:
tr08[~]$ quota -v
Disk quotas for user meand (uid 8650):
Filesystem blocks quota limit grace files quota limit grace
tau:/uspac/mc10/m10mr
0 0 0 0 0 0
I'm at a loss on what to do next. Google only gave me truncate and cat \dev\null, so any advice or suggestion would be gratefully received.
Output requested in the comments:
tr08[~]$ uname -a
Linux tr08.ecs 2.6.30.10-106a.fc11.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Sep 21 11:11:58 BST 2010 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
tr08[~]$ mount | grep /m08ad
tau:/uspac/mc10/m10mr on /auto/complb/m10mr type nfs (rw,nosuid,intr,sloppy,addr=163.1.88.228)
However: I'm not sure what happened, but when I logged in to get the details Gilles requested in the comments, I tried an rm, which worked just fine. quota -v is now producing no output, either. I've no idea whether this is due to some admin intervention or some other cunning trickery, but it all appears sorted now.
Best Answer
I don't really know, why the commands you mentioned would fail, but you could try
This tells the shell to truncate the file to 0 length without spawning another process.