Ticket 10215

Kris - we will look into this request and let you know.

I want to give you some extra information.

Internally, we can differentiate job states from job state flags. Job state flags gives a bit more detail on the status of the job at a certain moment.
Also, there are a few more states/flags than the ones you wrote there (like JOB_REQUEUE_CRON which is new in 20.11), I describe them below.

Generally speaking, any "state" 'greater' than JOB_SUSPENDED means that the job is effectively terminated, so a job in states PD, R or S can be modified, but a job in all other states is considered 'done'.

Depending on what happened to the job, sacct will show instead the state flags and not the job state.
For example, for a job that has been requeued you will see the state as REQUEUED (the flag).

(In this case, note that there will be duplicate entries for the job since a requeue creates a new entry for the job with same job id):

[lipi@llagosti 20.02]$ sacct --duplicates -j 17357
       JobID    JobName  Partition    Account  AllocCPUS      State ExitCode 
------------ ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- -------- 
17357              wrap      debug       lipi          2   REQUEUED      0:0    <--- That's the requeued job and steps
17357.batch       batch                  lipi          2  CANCELLED     0:15 
17357.extern     extern                  lipi          2  COMPLETED      0:0 
17357              wrap      debug       lipi          1    PENDING      0:0  <-- That's the new entry


In that case, you should consider RQ, SE, RV as definitive states. All the other ones are transient states and could potentially be changed.

/* JOB_STATE_FLAGS */

- CG - JOB_COMPLETING
	String: "COMPLETING"
- SO - JOB_STAGE_OUT
	String: "STAGE_OUT"
- CF - JOB_CONFIGURING
	String: "CONFIGURING"
- RS - JOB_RESIZING
	String: "RESIZING"
- RC - JOB_REQUEUE_CRON
	String: "REQUEUED_CRON"
- RQ - JOB_REQUEUE
	String: "REQUEUED"
- RF - JOB_REQUEUE_FED
	String: "REQUEUE_FED"
- RH - JOB_REQUEUE_HOLD
	String: "REQUEUE_HOLD"
- SE - JOB_SPECIAL_EXIT
	String: "SPECIAL_EXIT"
- ST - JOB_STOPPED
	String: "STOPPED"
- RV - JOB_REVOKED
	String: "REVOKED"
- RD - JOB_RESV_DEL_HOLD
	String: "RESV_DEL_HOLD"
- SI - JOB_SIGNALING
	String: "SIGNALING"

/* JOB_STATE_BASE */

- PD - JOB_PENDING:
	String: "PENDING"
- R - JOB_RUNNING:
	String: "RUNNING"
- S - JOB_SUSPENDED:
	String: "SUSPENDED"
- CD - JOB_COMPLETE:
	String: "COMPLETED"
- CA - JOB_CANCELLED:
	String: "CANCELLED"
- F - JOB_FAILED:
	String: "FAILED"
- TO - JOB_TIMEOUT:
	String: "TIMEOUT"
- NF - JOB_NODE_FAIL:
	String: "NODE_FAIL"
- PR - JOB_PREEMPTED:
	String: "PREEMPTED"
- BF - JOB_BOOT_FAIL:
	String: "BOOT_FAIL"
- DL - JOB_DEADLINE:
	String: "DEADLINE"
- OOM - JOB_OOM:
	String: "OUT_OF_MEMORY"



Does it clear your doubts?

Hi,

I am marking the bug as INFOGIVEN, please, set it as open again if something is not clear.

Thank you!