Apple Qmaster 3 - Manual (Page 32)

About Environment Variables and Preflight Scripts
You can streamline your workflow with environment variables and preflight scripts.
What’s an Environment Variable?
Environment variables are settings within a shell, from which commands are issued that
affect the way a program operates. People who regularly execute commands from a
Terminal shell, or write shell scripts, are usually familiar with environment variables.
For example, the environment variable called PATH tells the shell where to look for
commands that are entered. The PATH that is specified becomes the search path that
is used when locating a program. It is set for you automatically, but you will want to
add to it. For instance, if your user name is jane and there is a directory named groupbin
(in your home directory) that contains programs you want to run from a shell, the
environment variable name would be PATH and the value of that name would be
~jane/groupbin.
What’s a Preflight Script?
A preflight script is a script you can run on each node of a cluster prior to actually
processing the batch. These scripts are sent with every distributed segment of a job.
To set environment variables in Apple Qmaster
1 Select the command for which you want to set an environment variable.
2 Click the Set Environment button.
3 In the dialog that appears, you can add preflight scripts and environment variables or
edit or remove an existing one.
Click the Add (+) button,
then enter a variable
name and value.
• To add a variable: Click the Add (+) button, then select and edit Untitled Variable in
both the Name and Value columns.
• To remove a variable: Select it, then click the Remove (–) button.
32 Chapter 1 Using Apple Qmaster 3