[Swift-devel] Problems with coasters and managedfork jobmanager

[Ben Clifford]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Ian Foster wrote:

> The meaning of the answer "yes" to a negative question has different meanings
> depending on one's cultural origins :)

ha. indeed.

> What did you mean in this case?

job flow is cog commandline -> cog gt2 provider -> gram2 -> condor -> go!

This problem occurs with any use of Condor up until fairly recent 
versions. The Condor job submission file format (which in this case is 
being generated by gram2, but that is mostly irrelevant) doesn't cope with 
spaces in arguments:

Normally:
  echo "hi there"
has $1 equal to the entire string:  hi there
and no $2

If you submit the same through condor, you get $1=hi and $2=there

This then causes problems using on-the-commandline command sequences in sh 
or perl:

Something like this:

  sh -c 'echo foo'

which passes the entire command "echo foo" as the second parameter to sh 
gets turned into something like:
  $1=-c   (which is ok)
  $2=echo (or maybe 'echo)
  $3=foo (or maybe foo')

so sh runs the command "echo" with no parameters (as $2 instructs it to).

So its hard to run any non-trivial command through this mechanism.

There's future hope, though, as a hopefully fixed GRAM update is 
available, working with a recently fixed Condor, and that is likely to be 
deployed on OSG in due course (which is where most Condor woes occur).

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