[gcommer]

parallel is like xargs++; for simple cases it does the same thing as xargs, but it also has many more advanced features such as:

- Splitting input lines into multiple fields and building more complex commands from them

- Running jobs on remote nodes

- Pausing/resuming batch jobs (--joblog)

- ETA and progress bars

- Passing data to programs on stdin and generally many, many other ways of distributing and collecting data that xargs can't do

You can see a bunch of examples at: https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/man.html

  $ PAGER=cat man xargs | wc -l
  259
  $ PAGER=cat man parallel | wc -l
  3985

[e12e]

OT: I got curious, and this also works:

PAGER="wc -l" man xargs

(although my man page for xargs is just 211 lines)

[magissima]

Try changing your terminal's width and running it again ;)

[e12e]

Ah.

MANWIDTH=80 PAGER="wc -l" man xargs 292