Apple Compressor (4.0) - Manual (Page 244)

Chapter 8 Use Apple Qmaster to set up a distributed processing system 244
Advanced rendering information
Set environment variables in Apple Qmaster
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’s used when locating
a program. It’s set for you automatically, but you’ll 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.
You may want to set or change an environment variable for submitting certain jobs. When you
set an environment variable within Apple Qmaster, the new setting takes effect immediately. This
gives you an easy way to do things such as setting common directory paths or plug-in-specific
environment variables for Apple Qmaster jobs. Additionally, you can streamline your workflow
with environment variables and preflight scripts that you can run on each node of a cluster prior to
actually processing the batch. Preflight scripts are sent with every distributed segment of a job.
Add or remove an environment variable in Apple Qmaster
1 Select the command for which you want to set an environment variable.
2 Click the Set Environment button.
3 Add a preflight script and environment variable by doing one of the following:
Click the Add (+) button,
then enter a variable
name and value.
•
To add a variable: Click the Add (+) button, and select and edit Untitled Variable in both the
Name and Value columns.
•
To remove a variable: Select it, and click the Remove (–) button.
4 Click OK.
Your environment variables take effect immediately, and are retained only for the selected command.