alt Hacker NewsOh 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?
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> the app just hung there trying to figure out how long its command line can be?
That's common on linux. Many tools read from stdin if a file path isn't given: cat, xargs, base64, cksum, etc.
The citation thing is a little silly, I'll give you that one.
>Why the hell was perl even relevant? Nothing I wrote used Perl.
parallel is written in perl.
> Today I foolishly thought maybe I was the one who was holding it wrong […]
Apparently goes on to describe being confused about parallel reading from the standard input?
This is pretty funny. You almost had me until the Perl part. Not going to get baited this time!
I'm not new to command line tools, but I somehow managed to delete ~10k pictures while trying to use parallel to resize them.
I forget the details but it was some kind of surprisingly weird foot-gun behavior.
Luckily I had a backup, but it really has made me scared to try using parallel again.