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slurm

Hold several jobs in Slurm

I know that for a specific job ID, I can use scontrol hold $JOBID.

How can I hold jobs for several IDs or/and hold jobs for a range of jobs ids (e.g. scontrol hold 294724-294749)?

Also, how can I hold jobs based on my $USER?

Solution

  • First off, if all your jobs have the same name, you can use

    scontrol hold <jobname>

    to hold them all.

    But the scontrol command accepts a list of job IDs, which can be either space- or comma-separated. So if your jobs have consecutive job IDs, you can use Bash's {1..n} (Brace expansion) construct to generate the list and feed it to scontrol:

    scontrol hold {294724..294749}

    Otherwise, one common idiom is to use squeue's output formatting capabilities to generate scontrol commands and feed them to a shell:

    squeue --noheader --user $USER --format "scontrol hold %i" | sh

    (When doing that, it is wise to first run the squeue command without piping to sh to review its output before running it again through sh)