NAME

       globus-fork-starter - Start and monitor a fork job

SYNOPSIS

       globus-fork-starter

DESCRIPTION

       The globus-fork-starter program is executes jobs specified on its standard input stream, recording the
       job state changes to a file defined in the $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-fork.conf configuration file. It
       runs until its standard input stream is closed and all jobs it is managing have terminated. The log
       generated by this program can be used by the SEG to provide job state changes and exit codes to the GRAM
       service. The globus-fork-starter program is typically started by the fork GRAM module.

       The globus-fork-starter program expects its input to be a series of task definitions, separated by the
       newline character, each representing a separate job. Each task definition contains a number of fields,
       separated by the colon character. The first field is always the literal string 100 indicating the message
       format, the second field is a unique job tag that will be distinguish the reply from this program when
       multiple jobs are submitted. The rest of fields contain attribute bindings. The supported attributes are:

       directory
           Working directory of the job

       environment
           Comma-separated list of strings defining environment variables. The form of these strings is
           var=value

       count
           Number of processes to start

       executable
           Full path to the executable to run

       arguments
           Comma-separated list of command-line arguments for the job

       stdin
           Full path to a file containing the input of the job

       stdout
           Full path to a file to write the output of the job to

       stderr
           Full path to a file to write the error stream of the job

       Within each field, the following characters may be escaped by preceding them with the backslash
       character:

       •   backslash (\)

       •   semicolor (;)

       •   comma (,)

       •   equal (=)

       Additionally, newline can be represented within a field by using the escape sequence \n.

       For each job the globus-fork-starter processes, it replies by writing a single line to standard output.
       The replies again consist of a number of fields separated by the semicolon character.

       For a successful job start, the first field of the reply is the literal 101, the second field is the tag
       from the input, and the third field is a comma-separated list of SEG job identifiers which consist the
       concatenation of a UUID and a process id. The globus-fork-starter program will write state changes to the
       SEG log using these job identifiers.

       For a failure, the first field of the reply is the literal 102, the second field is the tag from the
       input, the third field is the integer representation of a GRAM erorr code, and the fourth field is an
       string explaining the error.

ENVIRONMENT

       If the following variables affect the execution of globus-fork-starter

       GLOBUS_LOCATION
           Path to Globus Toolkit installation. This is used to locate the globus-fork.conf configuration file.

FILES

       $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-fork.conf
           Path to fork SEG configuration file.

University of Chicago                              12/01/2009                              GLOBUS-FORK-STARTE(8)