[mpich-discuss] X11 and mpich2 - passing environment variables with a colon in the name

[Darius Buntinas]

Have you tried putting it in quotes?

   mpiexec -env DISPLAY ":0.0" -n4 executable_name

-d

On 01/29/2010 03:56 PM, John Watts wrote:
> One of the parallel processes delivers graphical output to an X11
> display.  By default ,when it runs under mpich2, it picks up a DISPLAY
> value of NULL. If I specify '-env DISPLAY 0.0', sure enough it tries to
> open display '0.0'. It fails, of course, because X11 DISPLAY variables
> contain a colon (eg :0.0).
>
> So here is the catch: Colon is a special field-separating character in
> mpiexec argument lists and I cannot figure out how to escape it or to
> pass it across as part of an environment name. The standard syntax - and
> the resulting error - are::
>
>  >mpiexec -env DISPLAY :0.0 -n4 executable_name
> Error: no environment variable after -env option
> Unable to parse the mpiexec command arguments.
>
> What's the way around this, please?
>