We noticed today that a %x anywhere in a job name like #SBATCH -J abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvw%xyz
Etc. will send scontrol (and maybe other %x-respecting programs) into an infinite loop. We had a user cron launching 'scontrol show job ######' regularly on a system and it was just going off the rails and eating resources until we killed it. The Slurm version 18.08.4 release email says that -- Expand %x in job name in 'scontrol show job'. ...so I wonder if that is armored to look for self-refferential calls. I haven't looked at the code, myself. I thought I'd give a heads up. I don't think our user was being malicious, and their actual -J was #SBATCH -J sd-PBEpvw9040%x Probably a hash and probably machine-generated/unlucky. I hope this helps and is actually a problem report. We're on 18.08.5, so I hope we don't have to go backwards to stop this error. Best regards, Bill. -- Bill Barth, Ph.D., Director, FutureTechnologies bba...@tacc.utexas.edu | Phone: (512) 232-7069 Office: ROC 1.435 | Fax: (512) 475-9445