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title: Controlling container reuse
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Copyright (C) The Arvados Authors. All rights reserved.

SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-SA-3.0
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This page describes how an admin can control container reuse using the @arv@ command. This can be utilized to avoid reusing a completed container without disabling reuse for the corresponding steps in affected workflows. For example, if a container exited successfully but produced bad output, it may not be feasible to update the workflow immediately. Meanwhile, changing the state of the container from @Complete@ to @Cancelled@ will prevent it from being used in subsequent workflows.

If a container is in the @Complete@ state, the following @arv@ command will change its state to @Cancelled@, where @xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@ is the @UUID@ of the container:

<pre>arv container update -u xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -c '{"state":"Cancelled"}'</pre>

Use the following command to list all containers that exited with 0 and were then cancelled:

<pre>arv container list --filters='[["state", "=", "Cancelled"], ["exit_code", "=", 0]]'</pre>See the "arv CLI tool overview":{{site.baseurl}}/sdk/cli/index.html for more details about using the @arv@ command.