It is a little difficult to see, but we do have specific notation rules for PBS commands. (Some of our man pages and command descriptions vary, and are not a reliable guide.) The rules we use are below:
- In the PBS docs, required arguments are not enclosed in anything. For example, we use this in
the qenable man page to indicate that a destination is required:
qenable destination
- To indicate that an argument is optional, use square brackets. For example, in the qstat man
page, the -E option is shown this way:
qstat [-E]
- For an argument that may take more than one value, such as a job ID, use angle brackets.
Here's an example from the pbsnodes man page:
pbsnodes -v <vnode>
- To show that something is both optional and variable, use angle brackets inside the square
brackets. From the qstat man page:
qstat [<job ID>]
Here's a good resource: http://docopt.org/