DUE TO TIME LIMIT

The job hit its wall-clock limit and was cancelled mid-run

why

The scheduler enforces the requested time, not the time the work needs. Partial output left behind is the dangerous part — it can look like a finished result to the next step in a pipeline.

what to do

Delete the partial outputs before rerunning, then request a realistic time based on a completed smaller run. If a step genuinely takes days, split it (per chromosome, per sample) so a failure costs one shard rather than the whole run.

Slurm / scheduler behaviour
This is one entry from BioErrors, a catalogue of bioinformatics error messages that point at the wrong thing. Every entry was traced to its real cause before it was written down.
If your error is not in it, paste it there and it gets traced and added.