Slurm Shortcuts: One Command to Cancel Last Submitted Job

TDLR;

scancel $(squeue -u username -h --format="%.15A" | sort -r | head -n1)

As I was waiting for some code to compile I decided to help FutureMe out and figure out this handy shortcut. One command to cancel the last job submitted to the slurm queue. This is useful to me since I usually submit my postprocessing scripts and sometimes after submitting I realized there was an error in it :/

So I wanted a quick command to cancel the last job that I submitted, the solution utilizes the built in slurm commands squeue and scancel and some simple bash commands.

First, retrieve all the JOBIDs running under your username.

squeue -u username -h --format="%.15A"

From the slurm docs, -h hides the header while --format allows you to specify the format of the output and A is the flag for JOBID.

Then use pipe that into sort (with the -r flag so that it goes from high to low) then into head ( with -n1 for only the one entry).

Then you can add this to your .bashrc file etc.

alias cancellast='scancel $(squeue -u username -h --format="%.15A" | sort -r | head -n1)'

With great power comes great responsibility. Use it well.