LSF Version 7.3 - Administering Platform LSF

Administering Platform LSF 739
Using lstcsh
Automatic Remote Execution
Every time you enter a command, lstcsh looks in your task lists to determine
whether the command can be executed on a remote host and to find the configured
resource requirements for the command.
See the Platform LSF Configuration Reference for information about task lists and
lsf.task file.
If the command can be executed on a remote host,
lstcsh contacts LIM to find the
best available host.
The first time a command is run on a remote host, a server shell is started on that
host. The command is sent to the server shell, and the server shell starts the
command on the remote host. All commands sent to the same host use the same
server shell, so the start-up overhead is only incurred once.
If no host is found that meets the resource requirements of your command, the
command is run on the local host.
Differences from Other Shells
When a command is running in the foreground on a remote host, all keyboard
input (type-ahead) is sent to the remote host. If the remote command does not read
the input, it is lost.
lstcsh has no way of knowing whether the remote command reads its standard
input. The only way to provide any input to the command is to send everything
available on the standard input to the remote command in case the remote
command needs it. As a result, any type-ahead entered while a remote command is
running in the foreground, and not read by the remote command, is lost.
@ character
The @ character has a special meaning when it is preceded by white space. This
means that the
@ must be escaped with a backslash \ to run commands with
arguments that start with
@, like finger. This is an example of using finger to get
a list of users on another host:
finger @other.domain
Normally the finger command attempts to contact the named host. Under
lstcsh, the @ character is interpreted as a request for remote execution, so the shell
tries to contact the RES on the host other.domain to remotely execute the
finger
command. If this host is not in your LSF cluster, the command fails. When the
@
character is escaped, it is passed to
finger unchanged and finger behaves as
expected.
finger \@hostB
Limitations
A shell is a very complicated application by itself. lstcsh has certain limitations:
Native language system
Native Language System is not supported. To use this feature of the tcsh, you must
compile
tcsh with SHORT_STRINGS defined. This causes complications for
characters flowing across machines.