Several environment variables are provided to PBS jobs. Some are taken from the user's environment and carried with a job, and others are created by PBS. There are also some environment variables that you can explicitly create for exclusive use by PBS jobs.

All PBS-provided environment variable names start with the characters "PBS_". Some start with "PBS_O_", which indicates that the variable is taken from the job's originating environment (that is, the user's environment).

A few useful PBS environment variables are described in the following list:

PBS_O_WORKDIR

Contains the name of the directory from which the user submitted the PBS job

PBS_O_PATH

Value of PATH from submission environment

PBS_JOBID

Contains the PBS job identifier

PBS_JOBDIR

Pathname of job-specific staging and execution directory

PBS_NODEFILE

Contains a list of vnodes assigned to the job

TMPDIR

The job-specific temporary directory for this job. Defaults to /tmp/pbs.job_id on the vnodes.