CSU and ACCESS (XSEDE) usernames

Your CURC username, which is represented by the environment variable $USER, has an @ symbol in it (e.g. janedoe@colostate.edu or johndoe@xsede.org).

The @ symbol can occasionally be misinterpreted by environments that employ PERL and cause unexpected behavior or errors. This may occur within a stand-alone PERL application or even within a conda-based application that employs PERL packages. As a workaround, symbolic links to your /home/$USER, /projects/$USER and /scratch/alpine/$USER directories have been created for all CSU and ACCESS (XSEDE) users. These symbolic links do not have @ symbols within them and therefore will not be misinterpreted by programs that utilize PERL. Below is an example of the symbolic links that are setup for the hypothetical user janedoe@colostate.edu:

/home/.colostate.edu/janedoe → /home/janedoe@colostate.edu

/projects/.colostate.edu/janedoe → /projects/janedoe@colostate.edu

/scratch/alpine/.colostate.edu/janedoe → /scratch/alpine/janedoe@colostate.edu

An easy way to use these alternate usernames is to set a $USER2 environment variable by adding the following line to your ~/.bashrc file:

export USER2=$(echo $USER |  awk -F@ '{print "."$2"/"$1}')

This will yield a $USER2 value of, for example, .colostate.edu/janedoe. This means that a path such as /projects/$USER2 is equivalent to /projects/$USER. Thus, if you are having issues with a conda installation because of the @ symbol, you can simply utilize /projects/$USER2 in your .condarc. For more information on .condarc see our Configuring Conda and Mamba with .condarc section.