In the SGE version of background jobs, it collects job info from the .status files, and then cross checks it with the output of qstat (for running jobs) and qacct (for finished jobs). I think it only reports jobs that appear in those programs' output. Part of the reason may be that they are the authoritative information on whether a job is still running, and whether it finished successfully. But I should probably also report about jobs that aren't mentioned by either, just using the info in the status file, so they don't just disappear. This includes jobs that were run outside of SGE, if we weren't using SGE jobs and then switched over, and might also be important if the SGE data base gets cleaned and forgets about long-finished jobs or something.
Anonymous