Hi there,

A feature request! :-) I'm trying to write a script to give users a "quality of guess" percentage for their requested time limits vs how long the job ran for.

Currently I'm faced with trying to parse the sacct output of days-hours:minutes:seconds but my understanding is that these numbers are already stored in the database in seconds.  It would be really handy to give sacct the ability to not convert these into the standard Slurm format when requested.

I can think of two ways to do this, one would be to make sacct --noconvert not convert times (though of course that might break current users, so perhaps letting --noconvert take an optional argument such as --noconvert=time might be better), and the other being to add an option to the SLURM_TIME_FORMAT environment variable to just print times in seconds.

In both cases you might want to use strftime()'s "%s" seconds since epoch for dates and the raw seconds for timelimit and elapsed.

How does that sound?

All the best,
Chris