Hi,

since I haven't seen it being mentioned so far: You could also just
sanitize the job comment field from any unwanted characters (e.g.
newlines) at submit time by filtering them in job_submit.lua. I do that
for both job comments and job names (otherwise you can apparently do
some pretty wild stuff like creating colored squeue output via ANSI
color codes):

function filter_specialchars(string, string_desc)
     string_clean = string:gsub("[^%w_%-%.%+%^%⁰-⁹]", "_")
     slurm.log_info("%s: Cleaned-up %s: %s.", log_prefix, string_desc,
string_clean)
     return string_clean
end

This function will replace all characters with underscores except
alphanumeric character, '_', '-', '.', '+', '^', and numeric
superscripts ('string' parameters is either job_desc.name or
job_desc.comment; the other two variables are for logging only:
'string_desc' is either 'job name' or 'job comment' and 'log_prefix' is
'slurm_job_submit'). The superscripts are allowed since our chemistry
users sometimes use them for chemical formulae (not quite IUPAC
compliant, but subscripts are much more of a hassle to type).

Kind regards
René Sitt

Am 22.09.26 um 22:49 schrieb Adam Novak via slurm-users:
> 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=
>
>
--
Dipl.-Chem. René Sitt
Abteilung Zentrale Systeme - Hochleistungsrechnen
Hochschulrechenzentrum (HRZ)
Hessisches Kompetenzzentrum für Hochleistungsrechnen (HKHLR)

Philipps-Universität Marburg
Hans-Meerwein-Straße 6
35032 Marburg
Büro: Gebäude H|04, Raum 04A32

T +49 6421 28-23523
E sittr@hrz.uni-marburg.de
M @sittr:matrix.uni-marburg.de

https://www.uni-marburg.de/de/hrz
https://www.hkhlr.de


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