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GNU Parallel Cheat Sheet [pdf]

gnu.org

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Re: GNU Parallel Cheat Sheet [pdf]

#11

Post by bonoboTP »

Ah, the rare case of nagware in GNU.

From the man page:

"--citation Print the BibTeX entry for GNU parallel and silence citation notice. If it is impossible for you to run --bibtex you can use --will-cite. If you use --will-cite in scripts to be run by others you are making it harder for others to see the citation notice. The development of GNU parallel is indirectly financed through citations, so if your users do not know they should cite then you are making it harder to finance development. However, if you pay 10000 EUR, you should feel free to use --will-cite in scripts."

Asking for donations/citations is one thing, but putting this junk in the man page about 10000 EUR and nagging users is quite an annoyance. How GNU allows such junk in their man pages puzzles me. Obviously the GPL allows one to remove the nagware and redistribute, but I don't know if anyone has forked it.

Re: GNU Parallel Cheat Sheet [pdf]

#12

Post by oids98d98s »

bonoboTP wrote: post #11

Ah, the rare case of nagware in GNU. From the man page: "--citation Print the BibTeX entry for GNU parallel and silence citation notice. If it is impossible for you to run --bibtex you can use --will-cite. If you use --will-cite in scripts to be run by others you are making it harder for others to see the citation notice. The development of GNU parallel is indirectly financed through citations, so if your users do no…

Gooood who caaaaares.

They spent a lot of time and effort, and made a cool thing and gave it away for free. If it bothers you so much, just add the flag. Or patch it out.

Re: GNU Parallel Cheat Sheet [pdf]

#14

Post by phonebanshee »

mruts wrote: post #3

I've never used GNU Parallel. But could someone explain to me the value add vs GNU xargs -P/--max-procs? From the examples at the top, it seems like those could be achieved with xargs.

I use both. xargs does a simple job reasonably well; if I'm just typing on the command line it often is the tool I use. parallel has many, many more options and ways to turn output from script A into parallel invocations of script B in multiple machines. Parallel is also handy just for parsing filenames; it's become my default tool for manipulating a stream of filenames and then running commands on them. The parallel part is just a nice plus.

Re: GNU Parallel Cheat Sheet [pdf]

#15

Post by jmiserez »

bonoboTP wrote: post #11

Ah, the rare case of nagware in GNU. From the man page: "--citation Print the BibTeX entry for GNU parallel and silence citation notice. If it is impossible for you to run --bibtex you can use --will-cite. If you use --will-cite in scripts to be run by others you are making it harder for others to see the citation notice. The development of GNU parallel is indirectly financed through citations, so if your users do no…

Yes. Another issue: The author has been promoting GNU Parallel pretty heavily on many StackOverflow questions dealing with xargs or parallel execution, even when an additional tool is neither needed nor wanted (because it's a) not already installed, unlike xargs, and b) because of the aforementioned citation issue which I disagree with).

It's a great tool I'm sure, but I've been able to get by using just xargs, flock, etc., for most usecases.

Re: GNU Parallel Cheat Sheet [pdf]

#17

Post by leppr »

bonoboTP wrote: post #11

Ah, the rare case of nagware in GNU. From the man page: "--citation Print the BibTeX entry for GNU parallel and silence citation notice. If it is impossible for you to run --bibtex you can use --will-cite. If you use --will-cite in scripts to be run by others you are making it harder for others to see the citation notice. The development of GNU parallel is indirectly financed through citations, so if your users do no…

Your criticism would be fair if FOSS authors were rightly conpensated for their work.

This isn't nearly the case, so until then blaming FOSS authors for some experimentations is just unwarranted.

Re: GNU Parallel Cheat Sheet [pdf]

#19

Post by ziotom78 »

gcommer wrote: post #2

A few slightly more advanced GNU Parallel features that I've used: - --joblog writes out a detailed logfile of the jobs, which can be used to resume from interrupted runs with --resume{,-failed} - `--slf filename` can be used to provide a list of ssh logins to remote worker nodes to run jobs. Importantly, parallel will automatically reread this list when it changes. This lets you very easily distribute batch jobs acr…

Yeah, --joblog is a very handy feature. I once hacked a small Python script to produce an ASCII time plot from its output:

https://github.com/ziotom78/plot_joblog

Re: GNU Parallel Cheat Sheet [pdf]

#20

Post by isaachier »

Mizza wrote: post #18

If you're using GNU Parallel for simple, non-parallel command line tasks and scripting, I've written a tool which I find to be much more intuitive: https://github.com/Miserlou/Loop The author of GNU Parallel wrote a pretty detailed comparison, which you can find in the linked README.

Your tool looks nice, but it doesn't seem to parallelize the work in any way.
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