Pass command line arguments via sbatch

The lines starting with #SBATCH are not interpreted by bash but are replaced with code by sbatch. The sbatch options do not support $1 vars (only %j and some others, replacing $1 by %1 will not work). When you don't have different sbatch processes running in parallel, you could try

#!/bin/bash

touch outFile${1}.txt errFile${1}.txt
rm link_out.sbatch link_err.sbatch 2>/dev/null # remove links from previous runs
ln -s outFile${1}.txt link_out.sbatch
ln -s errFile${1}.txt link_err.sbatch

#SBATCH -o link_out.sbatch
#SBATCH -e link_err.sbatch

hostname
# I do not know about the background processing of sbatch, are the jobs still running
# at this point? When they are, you can not delete the temporary symlinks yet.

exit 0

Alternative: As you said in a comment yourself, you could make a masterscript. This script can contain lines like

cat  exampleJob.sh.template | sed -e 's/File.txt/File'$1'.txt/' > exampleJob.sh
# I do not know, is the following needed with sbatch?
chmod +x exampleJob.sh

In your template the #SBATCH lines look like

#SBATCH -o "outFile.txt"
#SBATCH -e "errFile.txt"

I thought I'd offer some insight because I was also looking for the replacement to the -v option in qsub, which for sbatch can be accomplished using the --export option. I found a nice site here that shows a list of conversions from Torque to Slurm, and it made the transition much smoother.

You can specify the environment variable ahead of time in your bash script:

$ var_name='1'
$ sbatch -D `pwd` exampleJob.sh --export=var_name

Or define it directly within the sbatch command just like qsub allowed:

$ sbatch -D `pwd` exampleJob.sh --export=var_name='1'

Whether this works in the # preprocessors of exampleJob.sh is also another question, but I assume that it should give the same functionality found in Torque.

Using a wrapper is more convenient. I found this solution from this thread.

Basically the problem is that the SBATCH directives are seen as comments by the shell and therefore you can't use the passed arguments in them. Instead you can use a here document to feed in your bash script after the arguments are set accordingly.

In case of your question you can substitute the shell script file with this:

#!/bin/bash
sbatch <<EOT
#!/bin/bash

#SBATCH -o "outFile"$1".txt"
#SBATCH -e "errFile"$1".txt"

hostname

exit 0
EOT

And you run the shell script like this:

bash [script_name].sh [suffix]

And the outputs will be saved to outFile[suffix].txt and errFile[suffix].txt

If you pass your commands via the command line, you can actually bypass the issue of not being able to pass command line arguments in the batch script. So for instance, at the command line :

var1="my_error_file.txt"
var2="my_output_file.txt"
sbatch --error=$var1 --output=$var2 batch_script.sh