Parallel enhancement request: Parsing SLURM_NODELIST format

[court_cluster]

Parallel enhancement request: Parsing SLURM_NODELIST format

The Slurm HPC scheduler provides an environment variable SLURM_NODELIST listing nodes allocated to a job. However this list is provided in a custom compact format rather than the comma-separated list expected by the parallel -S remote-execution option.

For example, allocation:

node01,node02,node03,node05,node07,node09,node10,node12

becomes:

SLURM_NODELIST=node[01-03,05,07,09-10,12]

Testing with the latest version:

parallel --version

GNU parallel 20200122

The command:

seq 8 | parallel -S $SLURM_NODELIST hostname

fails with the error:

ssh: Could not resolve hostname node[01-03,05,07,09-10,12]: Name or service not known

Would it be possible for parallel to directly parse such compact hostname listings? Square brackets are not allowable in hostnames, so there is no possibility of breaking valid input.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostname#Restrictions_on_valid_hostnames

Thank you!