Encounter Quick Tip: How to Repair Command Line Navigation When Launching via bsub

When two users report the same issue in the same week I'm glad I can share the problem and solution via this blog.

I know a lot of you work in an environment where you request computing resources via "bsub." In many cases it's frowned upon to request an xterm to launch jobs and it's preferred to start an interactive session with something like "bsub -I encounter." What we were seeing was that command line navigation at the Encounter console was broken when launched via bsub yet was working fine when launched via an xterm. Backspace produced garbage characters like "^H", tab-completion didn't work, and arrow-up (precious arrow-up!) wouldn't retrieve the previously issued commands.

You could barely get around but it was truly painful.

The remedy we found was to launch jobs with "bsub -Ip encounter" instead of just "bsub -I encounter." The "-Ip" asks for an interactive prompt that should enable command line navigation to work as desired.

Hope this is useful. If this works/doesn't work for you -or- you're having any other problems with command line navigation let us know. Little things like that can really affect your impression of the software so I want to make sure everyone's console is working the way it should be.

Bob Dwyer