Grace period before enforcing soft limits for users:

Time units may be: days, hours, minutes, or seconds

  Filesystem             Block grace period     Inode grace period

  /dev/hda2                     7days                  7days

  /dev/hda7                     7days                  7days

root@pinguino:~# quota

Disk quotas for user root (uid 0): none

root@pinguino:~# quota -v

Disk quotas for user root (uid 0):

     Filesystem  blocks   quota   limit   grace   files   quota   limit   grace

      /dev/hda2   19173       0       0              26       0       0

      /dev/hda7      16       0       0               5       0       0

root@pinguino:~# quota -v ian

Disk quotas for user ian (uid 1000):

     Filesystem  blocks   quota   limit   grace   files   quota   limit   grace

      /dev/hda2       0       0       0               0       0       0

      /dev/hda7    2948   10240   11264             172    1000    1100

ian@pinguino:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=big1 bs=512 count=8000

8000+0 records in

8000+0 records out

4096000 bytes transferred in 0.019915 seconds (205674545 bytes/sec)

ian@pinguino:~$ cp big1 big2

ian@pinguino:~$ quota

Disk quotas for user ian (uid 1000):

     Filesystem  blocks   quota   limit   grace   files   quota   limit   grace

      /dev/hda7   10948*  10240   11264   7days     174    1000    1100

ian@pinguino:~$ cp big1 big3

cp: writing `big3': Disk quota exceeded