How to change the working directory on Slurm

I am working on a slurm cluster where I am running couple of jobs. It is hard for me to check the jobs one by one in each directory.

I could manage to check in which directory the jobs are running using

scontrol show job JOB_ID

This command gives me various lines on the output. Few of them are listed below

   OverSubscribe=OK Contiguous=0 Licenses=(null) Network=(null)
   Command=/home/astha/vt-st/scf-test/303030/49/qsub.job
   WorkDir=/home/astha/vt-st/scf-test/303030/49
   StdErr=/home/astha/vt-st/scf-test/303030/49/qsub.job.e1205
   StdIn=/dev/null
   StdOut=/home/astha/vt-st/scf-test/303030/49/qsub.job.o1205
   Power=
   MailUser=(null) MailType=NONE

Where WorkDir (this is an example, the path will be different for each job) from above output is the directory in which I want to switch.

then

cd /home/astha/vt-st/scf-test/303030/49

But typing this long commands make my fingers cry.

I have tried to make a small python script to print scontrol show job

# Try block
try:
    # Take a number
        print("scontrol show job")


# Exception block
except (ValueError):
  # Print error message
  print("Enter a numeric value")

But then how I should improve it so that it takes my given input number and then grep the WorkDir from the output and change the directory.

Solution

You will not be able to have a python script change your current working directory easily, and can do it simply in Bash like this:

$ cdjob() { cd $(squeue -h -o%Z -j "$1") ; }

This will create a Bash function named cdjob that accept a job ID as parameter. You can check it was created correctly with

$ type cdjob
cdjob is a function
cdjob ()
{
    cd $(squeue -h -o%Z -j "$1")
}

After you run the above command (which you can place in your startup script .bashrc or .bash_profile if you want it to survive logouts) you will be able to do

$ cdjob 22078365

and this will bring you to the working directory of job 22078365 for instance. You see that rather than trying to parse the output of scontrol I am using the output formatting options of squeue to simply output the needed information.