pbs(1B)

💖 pbs(1B) — the whole vibe, bestie 💖

okay so this is the general info page for pbs, straight from the PBS manual (section 1B) — and yes, we're gonna get into it ✨

---

🌸 NAME 🌸

pbs — literally the general information on pbs, and honestly? iconic of it.

---

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

PBS stands for Portable Batch System. no cap, it's a whole networked subsystem for submitting, monitoring, and controlling a workload of batch jobs across one or more systems. if you want more tea on PBS, the PBS Users Guide has you covered 🫶

so what does batch even mean? it means your job gets scheduled to run at a time that the subsystem picks — based on a defined policy and whatever resources are actually available ✨ for a normal batch job, the standard output and standard error get returned to files you can access once the job's done. that's different from an interactive session, where you type commands into the terminal and the output comes right back atcha 💅 PBS also does an interactive batch mode, where input and output are connected to your terminal but the scheduling is still under the batch system's control — main character energy, but make it scheduled 👑

a job is typically a shell script plus a set of attributes that carry the resource and control info about it. here's the slay: a job does not have to be submitted on the system where it'll actually run — it can be submitted on any system that has the PBS commands and access to the execution system, see qsub(1B). and the output comes back to the system you submitted from, unless you say otherwise 🦋

attributes? they're your control panel, bestie. they control when a job is eligible to run, what happens to the output when it's done, and how you get notified when it completes. you can specify them on the command line or right in the job script when you submit. for all the deets on job attributes, see qsub(1B) and pbs_job_attributes(7B) 🌈

okay one attribute is like, the VIP: the resource list. it specifies the amount and type of resources your job needs in order to execute — and lowkey it also implies a hard upper limit on usage of those resources. when the limit is hit, the job is terminated 💀 (yeah, dramatic, but that's the rule). the types of resources available vary with the system architecture. for the list of resources supported on the default system, see pbs_resources(7B). and there are man pages for other system types too — pbs_resources_aix4(7B), pbs_resources_fujitsu(7B), pbs_resources_irix5(7B), pbs_resources_solaris5(7B), pbs_resources_sp2(7B), pbs_resources_sunos4(7B), or pbs_resources_unicos8(7B) 💜

once a job's been submitted, you can monitor it with the qstat(1B) command. two forms of output, bestie:

• the default form is the short display — info about a job is limited to a single line 👑
• the complete info about the job or jobs comes through qstat with the -f option

you'll get info about all jobs in the system, all jobs in specified queues, or only specified jobs — your call ✨

when you're looking at job status, you'll see which queue the job resides in. and in PBS, a queue is just a collection point for jobs — it does not imply any execution ordering, fr fr. that ordering comes from a scheduling policy implemented by the system administration 💅

---

🦋 other commands of interest 🦋

these all have their own man pages, so go off:

• qalter — Alter a job's attributes.
• qdel — Delete a job.
• qhold — Place a hold on a job to keep it from being scheduled for running.
• qmove — Move a job to a different queue or server.
• qmsg — Append a message to the output of an executing job.
• qrerun — Terminate an executing job and return it to a queue.
• qrls — Remove a hold from a job.
• qselect — Obtain a list of jobs that met certain criteria.
• qsig — Send a signal to an executing job.

---

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

qalter(1B), qdel(1B), qhold(1B), qmove(1B), qmsg(1B), qrerun(1B), qrls(1B), qselect(1B), qsig(1B), qsub(1B) and the PBS User Guide.

and here's a cute lil tip: starting with qsub(1B), you can find all the other available PBS man pages by following the references in the "See Also" section — it's giving breadcrumb trail, and we love that for us 🍓🧚

---

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this local copy of the pbs(1B) manual page is from the Local source, dated with the pbs(1B) footer — slay, go read qsub(1B) next 💖