[Koahku]

This is a pretty good collection of small utilities but I would recommend using GNU Parallel[0] instead of the included parallel. It contains a ton of extremely useful additional features such as distributing jobs to remote computers.

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/

[quotemstr]

GNU Parallel will also infloop if any process on the system (run by any user) has an empty argv[0] (which can actually happen; parallel scans /proc to find instances of itself). When I reported the bug, the author refused to fix it on the grounds that this behavior is a "malware detector". Between this weirdness and the citation-interface weirdness, I'm not keen on GNU Parallel.

[tedunangst]

Lolwut? It responds to "malware" (empty argv) by infinite looping? That's a feature?

[jaytaylor]

One big turnoff with GNU parallel is that the first time it is run on a machine, you must interactively accept a EULA. There are ways around it, but as a rule of thumb I avoid command-line tools that do this, because this inconsistent runtime behavior is annoying at best and can easily break and complicate automation.

And no, I don't want to set an environment variable on a fleet of machines to suppress behavior which shouldn't be enabled by default to begin with! <cough> .NET telemetry </cough>

A real shame, because it is an otherwise useful tool IMHO.

[telotortium]

What it actually does is to beg you to cite parallel if you use it in academic work. There's two ways to silence it:

• Run `touch ~/.parallel/will-cite`.

• Pass the flag `--will-cite`.

Still annoying, although it's easy enough to disable.

[_delirium]

Fwiw the Debian & Ubuntu packages have disabled this behavior.

[user543823]

jobflow[1] is what I'd be suggesting unless there was a very specific reason to use something massive like GNU Parallel. It is used as part of Sabotage Linux's package manager.

[1]: https://github.com/rofl0r/jobflow

[edwintorok]

Suprised that nobody mentioned 'xargs -I{} -P N' yet. It is a GNU extension, but quite handy as it comes preinstalled pretty much on every Linux machine.