The quotacheck.8 man page states: quotacheck expects each filesystem to be checked to have quota files named [a]quota.user and [a]quota.group located at the root of the associated filesystem. If a file is not present, quotacheck will create it. This is incorrect. To create the new quotafiles, you have to use the -c option with quotacheck: quotacheck -c /home for example The documentation of the -c option in the man page states that -c Don't read existing quota files. Just perform a new scan and save it to disk. quotacheck also skips scanning of old quota files when they are not found. Some place in that man page, it really needs to point out that creation of quota files is done by quotacheck -c
The Redhat manual should also be changed. "Red Hat Linux 8.0: The Official Red Hat Linux System Administration Primer"
checkquota -c seems to only create the aquota.user file and not the aquota.group file. If you run "quotacheck -vg /home" to scan the partition, you get the error message "quotacheck: Cannot get quotafile name for /dev/hd??"." It works just to touch an aquota.group file, but you still get an error message the first time you run checkquota -vg to scan the partition for disk usage.
Additionally, at the top of the quotacheck(8) man page, there is this thoroughly ambiguous sentence: "It is strongly recommended to run quotacheck with quotas turned off on for the filesystem." Well, which is it? off or on? :)
This more or less is all good now. quotacheck /foo creates /foo/aquota.user automagically, and quotacheck -g /foo creates /foo/aquota.group. Comment #3 fixed as well