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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

https://computing.docs.ligo.org/guide/htcondor/environment/