alt Hacker NewsOn the topic of xargs replacements, I love gnu parallel.
The --dry-run flag of parallel made me confident to do more batch processing than I ever did with xargs.
Parallel has an option for almost everything, it's almost too much.
But I have shopped around for alternatives. The creator Ole Tange maintains a painstakingly long article of the alternatives and their differences. [0]
The gnu parallel book and reading materials [1] are excellent too.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/parallel_alternatives....
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Every time I’ve used Gnu Parallel on a new system it required accepting a Eula, which is annoying. I stick to xargs -P99 these days and am happier.
Utility software which has non-essential different first-run behavior is hostile to users.
Oh man, parallel is awful. I have to rant about this because I literally tried it again today morning.
Every single damn time I try parallel and decide to give it another chance, something ends up not working or causing a problem. I can never get it to just do what I want and get out of the way.
Today I foolishly thought maybe I was the one who was holding it wrong every single time in the past, so I copy pasted another command that was supposed to work, and thought surely this would be straightforward. Boy was I wrong. I got some manifesto about academic citations and plagiarism, which confused the hell out of me. After I wasted time trying to figure out how to turn off that nonsense, the app just hung there trying to figure out how long its command line can be? Literally doing nothing? What the hell? I killed it but then my terminal didn't close because every time I did this apparently some perl command was spawned in the background blocked on nothing. Why the hell was perl even relevant? Nothing I wrote used Perl. Just run the darn commands I asked in parallel, is that so hard?
isn't parallel that tool that dumps some kind of begging message into your output each time you invoke it?
I love GNU Parallel too. I love how it's free software and how I can patch out the obnoxious citation notice.
I have used echo as a sort of poor mans equivalent for a safe check of a pipeline, removing the echo when I felt the rest of the pipeline was working correctly.
I have also been known to write scripts where instead of executing the critical parts it prints them. Then a dry run is and the real run is