touchall

This systemd user unit recursively updates file timestamps in a given directory ($SCRATCH) to overcome the automatic deletion policy generally adopted on HPC clusters. When enabled, the unit will submit a heavily parallelized touch command on the whole content of the $SCRATCH directory at each login.

installation

1. Transfer touchall.service to ~/.config/systemd/user/ on the cluster. A systemd timer (touchall.timer, which runs the namesake service weekly) is also included, but pointless most of the time, because instances of systemd-user seemingly can't survive outside of the login session (at least on the cluster I use).

2. Edit the envvars in touchall.service (TA_PARTITION, TA_ACCOUNT and TA_SCRATCH) accordingly.

3. Run systemctl --user enable --now touchall.service to enable and execute the unit immediately.