It was recently pointed out to me that `scontrol show job` will include jobs' comments, and those comments seem to be able to contain arbitrary text, including newlines and "=". The comments don't seem to be delimited or escaped in any way within the `scontrol show job` output.

This means I can't actually parse the output of `scontrol show job`, because once a comment starts I can never tell that it has ended. Someone can put a whole valid-looking job record inside their job comment, or something that looks like the tail end of one job record and the beginning of another.

Is there a way to adjust the output format or access that data, as a normal cluster user, through another interface?

To illustrate the problem, I ran:

sbatch --wrap "sleep 10" --comment="$(printf "\n\nJobID=12345\n\n")"

And I found this in my `scontrol show job` output:

JobId=38807436 JobName=wrap
   UserId=anovak1(30065) GroupId=prismuser(600) MCS_label=N/A
   Priority=4202 Nice=0 Account=standard QOS=normal
   JobState=RUNNING Reason=None Dependency=(null)
   Requeue=1 Restarts=0 BatchFlag=1 Reboot=0 ExitCode=0:0
   RunTime=00:00:09 TimeLimit=00:10:00 TimeMin=N/A
   SubmitTime=2026-09-22T13:47:15 EligibleTime=2026-09-22T13:47:15
   AccrueTime=2026-09-22T13:47:15
   StartTime=2026-09-22T13:47:17 EndTime=2026-09-22T13:57:17 Deadline=N/A
   SuspendTime=None SecsPreSuspend=0 LastSchedEval=2026-09-22T13:47:17 Scheduler=Backfill
   Partition=short AllocNode:Sid=phoenix:1297984
   ReqNodeList=(null) ExcNodeList=(null)
   NodeList=phoenix-06
   BatchHost=phoenix-06
   NumNodes=1 NumCPUs=1 NumTasks=1 CPUs/Task=1 ReqB:S:C:T=0:0:*:*
   TRES=cpu=1,mem=4000M,node=1,billing=1
   Socks/Node=* NtasksPerN:B:S:C=0:0:*:* CoreSpec=*
   MinCPUsNode=1 MinMemoryCPU=4000M MinTmpDiskNode=0
   Features=(null) DelayBoot=00:00:00
   OverSubscribe=OK Contiguous=0 Licenses=(null) Network=(null)
   Command=(null)
   WorkDir=/private/home/anovak1/workspace/cwltool
   Comment=

JobID=12345
   StdErr=/private/home/anovak1/workspace/cwltool/slurm-38807436.out
   StdIn=/dev/null
   StdOut=/private/home/anovak1/workspace/cwltool/slurm-38807436.out
   Power=