Disk quota exceeded; truncate not bringing quota back down

Question

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.

Answer 1

I don't really know, why the commands you mentioned would fail, but you could try

> wordlist.txt

This tells the shell to truncate the file to 0 length without spawning another process.