The remoteMonitorCommand in monitors.dat isn’t parsed the same as remoteBinDirectory in sites.dat so the example way to define remoteMonitorCommand in the online documentation and the HUBzero workshop submit seminar PDF doesn’t quite work. The seminar PDF example is

remoteMonitorCommand = ${HOME}/Submit/monitorPBS.py

When I try that I’d get an error in /var/log/monitorJob.log bash: /root/Submit/monitorsPBS.py: Permission denied

because ${HOME} was getting interpreted as the user running /opt/submit/distributor.py (which is root). Whereas the ‘$’ should get escaped. submitbatchjob.py escapes “$” for putting together paths to the submitbatchjob.sh, receiveinput.sh, etc. scripts. It turns out that you can escape the path in monitors.dat and that works too, so you can do the following.

remoteMonitorCommand = \${HOME}/Submit/monitorPBS.py

Of course hardcoding the path would work too, but that’s not the way you would want to do it.