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.