Patent attributes
A new approach to support efficient management of directory quotas for a file system is proposed. The approach adopts bitmasks for files and directories in a file system, and transforms the problem of maintaining and traversing complicated file system data structures into a simple bitmask comparison and an associated lookup. It applies to files and directories under CIFS, NFS, other network file systems and local file systems and moves the costly operations of traversing the file system from file operations to administrative operation of switching the quotas on and off, which is infrequent and do not have the performance requirements of regular file operations.