General Computing

General Computing

Q. Why aren't common commands working?

Perhaps your shell is not set to Bash. If you already had another account before joining HPC, that profile will carry over, while a brand new account will always default to bash. If your shell is not set to Bash, contact our consultants so that they can reset it for you.

Q. Why is my terminal glitching (e.g. CTRL+A puts me in my command prompt)?

When you log into HPC, the variable $COMMAND_PROMPT is set to your current cluster (e.g.: (puma)). Sometimes this can cause formatting problems. If you'd prefer to modify your $PS1, you can add the following to your ~/.bashrc:

if [ -n "${PROMPT_COMMAND}" -a -r /usr/local/bin/slurm-selector.sh ]; then
  SavePS1=${PS1}
  Cur_Cluster=$(eval ${PROMPT_COMMAND} 2>/dev/null)
  PS1="${Cur_Cluster}${SavePS1}"
  unset PROMPT_COMMAND
  for c in puma ocelote elgato; do
     alias ${c}="PS1=\"(${c}) ${SavePS1}\"; . /usr/local/bin/slurm-selector.sh ${c}; unset PROMPT_COMMAND"
  done
  unset Cur_Cluster SavePS1
fi

Q. Why is my job producing core.xxxx files?

These files are called core dumps and may be created when a program terminates abnormally. Core dumps contain the system's memory at the time of the fault event as well as additional information that can be used with a debugger (e.g. gdb) to track down the source of the error.

One drawback to core dump files is they can be quite large. If you're working with limited space (e.g., your home directory or a nearly-full /groups or /xdisk) or are running many jobs, you may consider disabling them. To do this, include the following line in your batch script before your program's execution:

ulimit -c 0