How to pipe input to SLURM's sbatch?

I have a job script called testjob.sh which I submit as

sbatch testjob.sh

Is it possible to pipe some input to the script? If I ran as a simple command, I would do

echo 1 2 3 4 | ./testjob.sh

however, with SLURM, I tried the following and it does not work:

echo 1 2 3 4 | sbatch testjob.sh

My example script is this:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --export=ALL
#SBATCH --job-name=jobname
#SBATCH -e jobname.err
#SBATCH -o jobname.out
#SBATCH -p RM-shared
#SBATCH -n 1
#SBATCH --time=00:05:00

echo "jobscipt"
while read -r input 
do
        echo "from jobscipt $input"
done

and the outputs:

#this one worked
> echo 1 2 3 4 | ./testjob.sh
jobscipt
from jobscipt 1 2 3 4

#slurm did not take the input
> echo 1 2 3 4 | sbatch testjob.sh
Submitted batch job 3758713
> cat jobname.out
jobscipt

I know it's possible to set arguments to sbatch via setting environmental variables with --export, but how would I pipe an input to it? A workaround to pipe would be a temporary file but that's not particularly elegant.

Solution

sbatch runs the job in a different environment ("in the background"), therefore you can't pipe stuff into the scripts.

You can avoid this in two ways:

use srun instead of sbatch, which doesn't disconnect the job from your session and piping works more-or-less normally. Still, this doesn't allow you to "queue" the job as with batches.
use intermediate file for saving the input, i.e., modify the batch file to read the input from testjob.in:

while read -r input
do
   ...
done < testjob.in

and put your input into the intermediate file before enqueueing the batch:

echo 1 2 3 4 > testjob.in
sbatch testjob.sh