[padb-users] Illegal hex digit ' '

[Ashley Pittman]

On 5 Aug 2010, at 13:15, Jonathan Dursi wrote:

> So I'm trying to use padb with orte-launched jobs, and gdb 7.1 or 6.8.
> 
> Things weem to work ok, but padb reports the following messages constantly, which makes --watch more or less unusable:

> einner: Illegal hexadecimal digit ' ' ignored at /scinet/gpc/tools/padb/padb-3.0/bin/padb line 5036, <GEN3> line 169.
> einner: Illegal hexadecimal digit ' ' ignored at /scinet/gpc/tools/padb/padb-3.0/bin/padb line 5036, <GEN3> line 195.

These errors come from the code to interact with gdb, padb runs with perl warnings enabled so it does sometimes report this kind of error.  In particular different versions of gdb produce different output and I spent a lot of effort last year trying to catch and correct these cases.  I suspect the errors would go away if you tried using the 3.2 beta release, if they don't or you don't want to do that then the fix is to change the first line of padb and remove the -w option from the perl command line.

In fact I've just checked, I've removed the -w flag from 3.2 anyway to avoid just this situation.

> Am I doing something wrong?

No, I don't think so.

You should be aware that using --watch to monitor jobs in a mode which interrupts the job with gdb will have a significant performance impact on the job, unfortunately this cannot be helped so I wouldn't recommend doing it routinely unless you are looking for a specific problem or use a long interval period. 

Ashley.

-- 

Ashley Pittman, Bath, UK.

Padb - A parallel job inspection tool for cluster computing
http://padb.pittman.org.uk