Disabling getenv = true
in HTCondor workflows¶
Effective Date: End of O4, 1 Nov 2025
Service Impacted: Setting getenv = true
in HTCondor submission files for any workflow on LVK resources will be disallowed.
Details¶
Overview¶
HTCondor supports a getenv
submit command that copies some or all of a user's current shell environment variables at the time of job submission into the job environment at runtime.
The special value true
can be used to copy all variables found at submission time. Use of this value makes a job's runtime environment non-deterministic, and thus makes a workflow extremely hard to reproduce exactly.
The Computing and Software Working Group will be instructing all LVK computing providers to disallow setting getenv = true
in HTCondor workflows via the SUBMIT_ALLOW_GETENV = false
configuration macro.
Impact¶
Any workflow that attempts to submit jobs that include getenv = true
in the submit commands will fail to submit.
Workflows should be modified to either explicitly declare all environment variables using the environment
command, or to explicitly list out the necessary environment variables that should be imported by the getenv
command.
For more details on this syntax, please see