Is it possible to change a job ID to something human-readable? - pbs

I'd like to send myself a text when a job is finished. I understand how to change the job name so that the .o and .e files have the appropriate name. But I'm not sure if there's a way to change the job ID from a string of numbers to a specified key so I know which job it is. I usually have a lot of different jobs going at once, so it's difficult to remember all the different job ID numbers. Is there a way in the .pbs script to change the job ID so that when I get the message I can see which job it is rather than just a string of numbers?

If you are using Torque and add the -N flag, then you can add a name to the job. It will still use the numeric portion of the job id as part of the output and error filenames, but this allows you to add something to help you distinguish among your jobs. For example:
$ echo ls | qsub -N whatevernameyouplease

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Queue SLURM jobs to run X minutes after each other

I have been trying to search around for an example of how to use the following option for job dependencies, -d, --dependency=<dependency_list>.
In the documentation, the syntax is shown to be after:job_id[[+time][:jobid[+time]...]]
But I am unable to find any examples of this, and to be honest I find the presentation of the syntax confusing.
I have tried sbatch --dependency=after:123456[+5] myjob.slurm and sbatch --dependency=after:123456+5 myjob.slurm, but this yields the error
sbatch: error: Batch job submission failed: Job dependency problem.
How can I add a dependency to Job B so that it starts X minutes after Job A starts?
The square brackets [...] indicate an optional parameter value and should not appear in the actual parameter value. Try with
sbatch --dependency=after:123456+5 myjob.slurm
With guidance from damienfrancois to exclude the brackets, I tried the following
sbatch --dependency=after:123456:+5 myjob.slurm
Which seems to work beautifully, listing it in the queue as dependent.
EDIT: This is for version 19.05.07

How to order control m job using REXX? like Control m utility CTMAPI

I have to order few jobs in control m from different scheduling tables. this is manual task so i want to automate it using rexx.
I found below in 'Order or Force under Batch, REXX or CLIST' section of 'CONTROL M USERGUIDE'
EXEC CTMAPI PARM=‘ORDER variable’
I could not find syntax to call CMTAPI using rexx.
ADDRESS 'LINKMVS' is the equivalent of // EXEC PGM=something,PARM='whatever' in REXX. I don't know what the variable is supposed to be, but since this is Control-M, I am going to assume job name. A very simple example:
say 'Enter name of job'
pull jobname
parmvar = 'ORDER' jobname
`ADDRESS 'LINKMVS' 'CTMAPI parmvar'
Please note that for LINKMVS, the variable name goes inside the string passed. The LINKMVS environment substitutes the variable automatically. For example, if I entered MYJOB to the prompt, LINKMVS will build a PARM string of `ORDER MYJOB'. This is the exact equivalent of
// EXEC PGM=CTMAPI,PARM='ORDER MYJOB'
This IBM® Knowledge Center page for the z/OS 2.3 TSO/E REXX Reference manual shows several examples of calling a program in the same manner as // EXEC PGM=,PARM= (item 1). Items 5 through 9 show different ways of using ADDRESS 'LINKMVS'; note how variables are treated in each example.
After suggestions from NicC, zarchasmpgmr and few research, finally i am able to order job with CTMJOB utility. I searched for the loadlib and called TSO using REXX.
/*****REXX*******/
ADDRESS TSO
"CALL 'MY.IN.LOAD(CTMJOB)'
' ORDER DSN=MY.SCHED.LIB TABLE=SCHDTBL,
JOB=JOBNAME,DATE=DATE'"
EXIT
Details found in INCONTROL for ZOS utilities guide. This document was very useful.
http://documents.bmc.com/supportu/952/56/64/195664/195664.pdf

How can you hide passwords in command line arguments for a process in linux

There is quite a common issue in unix world, that is when you start a process with parameters, one of them being sensitive, other users can read it just by executing ps -ef. (For example mysql -u root -p secret_pw
Most frequent recommendation I found was simply not to do that, never run processes with sensitive parameters, instead pass these information other way.
However, I found that some processes have the ability to change the parameter line after they processed the parameters, looking for example like this in processes:
xfreerdp -decorations /w:1903 /h:1119 /kbd:0x00000409 /d:HCG /u:petr.bena /parent-window:54526138 /bpp:24 /audio-mode: /drive:media /media /network:lan /rfx /cert-ignore /clipboard /port:3389 /v:cz-bw47.hcg.homecredit.net /p:********
Note /p:*********** parameter where password was removed somehow.
How can I do that? Is it possible for a process in linux to alter the argument list they received? I assume that simply overwriting the char **args I get in main() function wouldn't do the trick. I suppose that maybe changing some files in /proc pseudofs might work?
"hiding" like this does not work. At the end of the day there is a time window where your password is perfectly visible so this is a total non-starter, even if it is not completely useless.
The way to go is to pass the password in an environment variable.

Find out ID of 'at' job from within it

When I schedule a job with 'at' it is assigned an id, viz:
job 44 at 2014-01-28 17:30
When that job runs I would like to get at that id from within it. This is on Centos, FWIW. I have established that no environment variable contains the ID. When the Perl code in that job runs I would like it to be able to print the job ID (44 in this example).
Yes, I know that atq shows an = next to jobs that are executing, but there might be more than one of those at a time.
I could do something like pass a unique argument to the job when scheduling it, capture the ID, save that and the argument to a file somewhere, read that from the job. That's a lot of work I'd rather not go to if I don't have to, and it seems like this should be simple but I'm drawing a blank.
What follows is figured out by reading sources of at-3.14. The way at puts job id and the time when it is run into the file name should be similar for any version, but I haven't checked this.
To begin whith at encodes the job id and the time when a particular job should be run into the file name describing a job. The file name has format aJJJJJTTTTTTTT, where JJJJJ is 5 character hexadecimal string, the job id, and TTTTTTTT is an 8 character hexadecimal string, the time when the job should be run. The time is stored as seconds from the epoch.
At jobs are run by feeding a job description file as the standard input to sh -c. Fortunately the Linux kernel provides a symbolic link, /proc/self/fd/0, which will point to the standard input of the process currently being executed (play with ls -l /proc/self/fd/0 in case you need to assure yourself that this indeed is so).
A file describing a job has been deleted by the time a job is run. However, the file is still available for the kernel because it has been duplicated with dup(2) before being used as the standard input for a job. So, actually we are resolving a symbolic link to a file name which is not visible any more. In the perl script at the end we need to take this into account as readlink will return something like /foo/bar/baz (deleted) instead of /foo/bar/baz. And we're interested in just the file name which has all the information we need.
The reason why the symbolic link points to a deleted file is because at daemon unlinks the original before executing the job. Unlinking gets done only after creating a copy, a hard link, which begins with = instead of a. With this the at daemon tries to ensure there will be only one copy of a job running: the daemon will not execle(2), ie. it will bail out, should the link(2) fail. Because the original file has been subject to open(2) and dup(2) the inode is still there for the kernel to use because it still has hard links pointing to it.
After a fairly long and possibly confusing introduction, here is how to put it all together:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $job_file = readlink("/proc/self/fd/0");
if (index($job_file, " ") > 0) {
$job_file = substr($job_file, 0, index($job_file, " ") - 1);
}
my $tmp = substr($job_file, rindex($job_file, "/") + 1);
$tmp =~ s/^a([0-9a-f]{5})[0-9a-f]+/$1/;
my $job_id = hex($tmp);
if ($job_id > 0) {
printf("My AT job id is %d.\n", $job_id);
}
# end of file.

Handle "race-condition" between 2 cron tasks. What is the best approach?

I have a cron task that runs periodically. This task depends on a condition to be valid in order to complete its processing. In case it matters this condition is just a SELECT for specific records in the database. If the condition is not satisfied (i.e the SELECT does not return the result set expected) then the script exits immediately.
This is bad as the condition would be valid soon enough (don't know how soon but it will be valid due to the run of another script).
So I would like somehow to make the script more robust. I thought of 2 solutions:
Put a while loop and sleep constantly until the condition is
valid. This should work but it has the downside that once the script
is in the loop, it is out of control. So I though to additionally
after waking up to check is a specific file exists. If it does it
"understands" that the user wants to "force" stop it.
Once the script figures out that the condition is not valid yet it
appends a script in crontab and stops. That seconds script
continually polls for the condition and if the condition is valid
then restart the first script to restart its processing. This solution to me it seems to work but I am not sure if it is a good solution. E.g. perhaps programatically modifying the crontab is a bad idea?
Anyway, I thought that perhaps this problem is common and could have a standard solution, much better than the 2 I came up with. Does anyone have a better proposal? Which from my ideas would be best? I am not very experienced with cron tasks so there could be things/problems I could be overseeing.
instead of programmatically appending the crontab, you might want to consider using at to schedule the job to run again at some time in the future. If the script determines that it cannot do its job now, it can simply schedule itself to run again a few minutes (or a few hours, as it may) later by way of an at command.
Following up from our conversation in comments, you can take advantage of conditional execution in a cron entry. Supposing you want to branch based on time of day, you might use the output from date.
For example: this would always invoke the first command, then invoke the second command only if the clock hour is currently 11:
echo 'ScriptA running' ; [ $(date +%H) == 11 ] && echo 'ScriptB running'
More examples!
To check the return value from the first command:
echo 'ScriptA' ; [ $? == 0 ] echo 'ScriptB'
To instead check the STDOUT, you can use as colon as a noop and branch by capturing output with the same $() construct we used with date:
: ; [ $(echo 'ScriptA') == 'ScriptA' ] && echo 'ScriptB'
One downside on the last example: STDOUT from the first command won't be printed to the console. You could capture it to a variable which you echo out, or write it to a file with tee, if that's important.

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