How to use qdel all to remove only idle jobs

Question

I am having an issue where if I have 2000 jobs queued and try to delete them with qdel all, it'll keep trying to delete the running jobs first. This means I have to wait a long time for the jobs to get deleted because removing from the Running list is slower than Idle list.

Thus how do I remove all Idle jobs without touching the Running jobs?

Answer 1

If the job ids are in sequential order, you could use Bash's brace extension. For example:

$ echo {0..9}
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Transferred to delete all jobs ranging from 1000 to 2000, the qdel command would be:

qdel {1000..2000}

This might even work if there are job ids that you are not allowed to delete (from other users). They should be simply ignored. (not tested)