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GNU Parallel Citation Notice

8 points| alasarmas | 1 year ago |git.savannah.gnu.org

6 comments

order

ggm|1 year ago

Possibly the first nagware I ever used. Some variants of xargs can do some of what parallel does, if the nag annoys you. I am unsure how smooth the parallelism is in that model and they differ on argument quoting norms so it's not a simple drop in replacement necessarily.

Joel_Mckay|1 year ago

There are some subtle differences, and on rare occasion xargs won't do when:

1. the order of single line output results does not need preserved

2. long running parallel tasks are non-blocking for efficiency reasons

3. optionally need to include remote computers in a cluster

Toy example IP blacklist preparation:

cat ./banlist_ipv4.raw | parallel --ungroup --eta --jobs 24 "ipcalc {} | sed '2!d' " | grep -Ev '^(0.|255.|127.)' > ./banlist_ipv4.formatted

In this toy case, the child processes may be loaded hundreds of thousands of times. Thus, the random exiting parallel child processes avoiding blocking/waits reduces runtime cost.

Its FOSS, people shouldn't feel entitled to complain about how authors share their works. =3