GLOBUS-FORK-STARTE(8)					       University of Chicago					     GLOBUS-FORK-STARTE(8)

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:

       o   backslash ()

       o   semicolor (;)

       o   comma (,)

       o   equal (=)

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

       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)