qdisable(8B)

💅 qdisable — bestie, let's close this queue down

okay so real talk, this is qdisable(8B) from the PBS Professional manual, and it's genuinely one of the most useful little commands ever. picture this: you've got a queue, and you want it to stop taking new jobs. that's it. that's the whole vibe. ✨

🎀 NAME 🎀

qdisable — literally just prevents a queue from accepting jobs. no cap, that's the entire job description.

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

qdisable <destination> [<destination> ...]
qdisable --version

like, you can hit it with one or more destinations, or you can just ask it what version it's running. pick your fighter 💖

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so here's the tea ☕ — qdisable prevents a queue from accepting batch jobs. mechanically, it sets the value of the queue's enabled attribute to False. that's the actual thing it does, no cap.

if the command is accepted, the queue no longer accepts Queue Job requests. but here's the important part bestie — jobs already in the queue continue to be processed. they're not getting kicked out or anything, they just finish up like normal. so you can absolutely use this to drain a queue of jobs, which is lowkey iconic when you need to do maintenance or just want the queue to chill for a sec. 🧚

👑 Required Permission

okay so this is the bouncer-at-the-club part: in order to execute qdisable, the user must have PBS Operator or Manager privilege. if you don't have it, you're not getting in, sorry bestie 😭

✨ OPTIONS ✨

• --version — the qdisable command returns its PBS version information and exits. heads up though: this option can only be used alone. it's a solo act, no plus-ones. 💅

🍓 OPERANDS 🍓

the qdisable command accepts one or more space-separated destination operands. the operands take any of the following forms:

• <queue name> — prevents specified queue at default server from accepting jobs.
• @<server name> — prevents all queues at specified server from accepting jobs. (all of them. every single one. go off 👑)
• <queue name>@<server name> — prevents specified queue at specified server from accepting jobs.

and here's the one that trips people up: to prevent all queues at the default server from accepting jobs, you don't use qdisable at all — you use the qmgr command:

Qmgr: set queue @default enabled=false

iykyk 🫶

💀 STANDARD ERROR 💀

the qdisable command writes a diagnostic message to standard error for each error occurrence. so if multiple things go wrong, you get multiple messages. it's not gonna hide the mess from you, bestie 🙈

🌈 EXIT STATUS 🌈

• Zero — upon successful processing of all the operands. slay. everything worked. 🎉
• Greater than zero — if the qdisable command fails to process any operand. not slay. something went sideways. 💀

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

pbs_server(8B), qmgr(8B), and qenable(8B) — go read those too, they're the friend group this command runs with. qenable is literally the opposite of this one, so if you ever need to undo the thing, you know where to go 💜

tiny reminder from your girl: disabling a queue does not kill the jobs already in it. they keep processing. if you were hoping this would nuke everything — it will not. it's a drain, not a delete. periodt. 💅

and that's the whole page, bestie! this edition of qdisable(8B) is from Local, dated 6 May 2020 — so yes, she's a classic, but she still serves. 🎀✨🦋