Can't delete files in cPanel and I am over quota

[Matt]

Problem: You try to delete files in the file manager in your control panel, but you cannot remove them, and your account is over quota.

Solution: Use your FTP account to login and remove the files that you no longer need to clear up your disk space.

Reason: The control panel sees that your account is over quota. The control panel file manager creates temporary files under your account so that it can perform certain actions like file deletion. However, since the account is over quota, the control panel will no longer allow new files to be created or written to. Because of that the operation will fail with an error. using your FTP account does not create files it simply issues the delete command to the server and the files will be removed.

[ourcoffeebarn]

I just had Glowhost support fix a problem with a huge amount of core files showing up on my site. I have no idea where they came from and I could not delete them using ftp access either, (Support may have been deleting them at the same time though).

Where did they come from?
Can we prevent it from happening again? (It happened before too)

[Matt]

core files come from a core dump. A core dump can happen for lots of reasons, but in shared hosting it generally occurs if:

1. Your site software is not compatible with the latest server software versions.

2. The server software itself was/is having issues.

I'd verify your cart is fully compatible with the PHP version your server runs as well as MySQL 4.1. It would not hurt to check and see about compatibility for the coming months about MySQL 5.x which is planned soon and possibly PHP 5 as well.