Miscellaneous questions (batch jobs, sudo, etc.)

[evoweiss]

Hi all,

I will shortly be running a series of statistical analyses using Mplus which I have installed under wine (it works perfectly!).

Given how long analyses of the sort I will be doing take, I was wondering whether there were good facilities to set up batch jobs. When I was doing some research as a graduate student, the computing facility had a great program on the AIX system. You'd basically tell it to run program X and it would push it in the background and send you an email when it was done.

Are there similar programs out there for linux?

Finally, while I have Mplus installed under my user account on my workstation, I think it would make more sense to install it under root and then to somehow allow me to access the program. Unfortunately, I tried this a while back and it was easier said than done! If somebody out there could help me figure this out, I'd really appreciate it.

Best,

Alex

[John R. Graham]

For batch systems, on the high end, there is sys-cluster/torque, based on OpenPBS, which is a full-up batch job management system. On the low end, there's app-misc/screen, which will allow you to start programs on a virtual console and then detach from them, allowing them to run in the background with (optionally) logged screen content.

- John

[evoweiss]

Hi,

[John R. Graham]

Well, if you've got all the other pieces to your relative satisfaction, why not use sendmail? Many programs can send mail when exceptional events happen; all Gentoo ebuilds of programs that need to do so depend on virtual/mta because there are many packages that provide "sendmail". On my system, it's provided by mail-mta/ssmtp. "man ssmtp" will explain how to use it.

- John