CONDOR_FINDHOST(1)

✨ NAME ✨

okay so bestie, welcome to the condor_findhost page of the HTCondor manual 💖

condor_findhost — find machine(s) in the pool that can be used with minimal impact on currently running HTCondor jobs, and that best meet any specified constraints. it's giving "which one of y'all can i borrow real quick without breaking everything" 🎀

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

condor_findhost [-help ] [-m ] [-n num] [-c c_expr] [-r r_expr] [-p
centralmanagerhostname]

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so basically, condor_findhost goes snooping around an HTCondor pool of machines and finds the best machine — or machines — that would have the minimum impact on the HTCondor jobs that are already running, if you were to yoink that machine (or machines) out of the pool. 💀

and like, you can keep the search in check: limit it to whatever matches a set of constraints and a rank expression. no cap.

condor_findhost hands you back a fully-qualified domain name for each machine. ✨ the search is limited (aka constrained) to a specific set of machines if you use the -c option. and the search can use the -r option for rank — that's the criterion used for picking the machine or machines out of that constrained list. main character selection energy, fr fr 👑

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🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

• -help — show the usage info and dip. that's it, that's the whole thing 🙈
• -m — only search for entire machines. slots that live inside an entire machine are simply not considered here, bestie. nope.
• -n num — find and list up to num machines that fulfill the spec. num is an integer greater than zero (so like, please don't be weird about it 💀).
• -c c_expr — constrain the search so it only considers machines that come out of evaluating c_expr. c_expr is a ClassAd expression. 🧚
• -r r_expr — r_expr is the rank expression, evaluated and used as the basis for machine selection. r_expr is a ClassAd expression. ⭐
• -p centralmanagerhostname — specify the pool you wanna search by giving the central manager's host name. without this option, the current pool is the one that gets searched. 🫶

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👑 GENERAL REMARKS 👑

condor_findhost is the tool you use to locate a machine within a pool that can be taken out of the pool with the least disturbance of the pool. periodt. 🎀

an administrator should set preemption requirements for the HTCondor pool. the expression

(Interactive =?= TRUE )

will let condor_findhost know that it can claim a machine even if HTCondor would not normally preempt a job running on that machine. iykyk 🌈

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💀 EXIT STATUS 💀

the exit status of condor_findhost is zero on success. 🎉

but if it's not able to identify as many machines as you requested, it returns one more than the number of machines identified. so like, if 8 machines are requested and condor_findhost only locates 6, the exit status will be 7. math is math 😭

and if it's not able to locate any machines at all, or an error is encountered, condor_findhost will return the value 1. 🙈

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🔥 EXAMPLES 🔥

to find and list four machines, preferring those with the highest mips (on Drystone benchmark) rating:

$ condor_findhost -n 4 -r "mips"

to find and list 24 machines, considering only those where the KFlops attribute is not defined:

$ condor_findhost -n 24 -c "kflops=?=undefined"

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💜 AUTHOR 💜

HTCondor Team 🫶

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🌟 COPYRIGHT 🌟

1990-2026, Center for High Throughput Computing, Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, US. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. 📜

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and that's the whole page, bestie 💖 this was the condor_findhost entry from the HTCondor Manual, dated Oct 16, 2026 — slay, go find yourself a machine 🎀✨👑