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Goal

My server manages jobs using SLURM. Each job in the queue has a job ID, which can be either a single integer or two integers separated by an underscore, e.g., 123_4. You can use scontrol show job [job ID] to print some general info about the job, including the name of the file that stores the standard output (specifically, there is a line that says StdOut=/path/to/stdout/file). All I want to do is write an alias that takes the ID from the terminal input and opens this file in vim.

My attempt

alias checkout='vi $(scontrol show job $1 | grep StdOut | cut -d'=' -f 2)

The problem

When I try checkout 123_4, the script ignores the _4 part. This is a problem because in practice, this part is the array ID, and there will be many jobs in a single array. Hence, scontrol will print a bunch of StdOut=... lines, and vim will open a bunch of files (for jobs 123_1, 123_2, etc.). The issue must be in how $1 reads in the terminal input, but I couldn't figure out how to fix that. For example, I tried replacing it with $@ and $*, and doing something like "${1}" to no avail.

I figure this should be an easy fix for anyone more experienced with bash!

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    Aliases don't take positional parameters like $1 - I suspect what's really happening is that $1 is expanding to an empty string, and you're running scontrol show job without a job ID, which is therefore listing all jobs by default. Commented Jun 19, 2023 at 13:28
  • Use a shell function instead of an alias to handle arguments. Your code seems to have problems with quoting. There is an odd number of single quotes. Commented Jun 19, 2023 at 13:31

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