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GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

alexplescan.com

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Re: GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

#41

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

throwaway277432 wrote: post #33

Is the author still adding the "cite me or pay 10000€" notice to the output? And calling that GPL? And still answering every xargs Stackoverflow question with "you should use GNU Parallel" instead of answering the question? That really gets old quickly when googling for xarg answers. These are just some of the reasons I'll never use parallel. xargs is perfectly fine for most usecases, and it can do everything I need…

I wanted to say 'not anymore', but it turns out that some distributions remove that message.

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/pa...

Debian too (thanks to iib for pointing this out)

https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/parallel/-/tree/master/deb...

And looks like the author is aware of both:

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/pa...

Re: GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

#42

Post by capableweb »

throwaway277432 wrote: post #33

Is the author still adding the "cite me or pay 10000€" notice to the output? And calling that GPL? And still answering every xargs Stackoverflow question with "you should use GNU Parallel" instead of answering the question? That really gets old quickly when googling for xarg answers. These are just some of the reasons I'll never use parallel. xargs is perfectly fine for most usecases, and it can do everything I need…

> Is the author still adding the "cite me or pay 10000€" notice to the output? And calling that GPL?

Where you get the "or pay 10000€" part from? As far as I remember, the software, unless told otherwise, asks authors of scientific papers to cite GNU parallels if they used it when writing their papers. And it doesn't force it, it's not part of the license, but asks you to do so as it's academic tradition to use citations.

You could just ignore the citation and not break the license, no one would think less of you for doing so.

Re: GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

#43

Post by bloopernova »

amelius wrote: post #35

Another reminder that you shouldn't use Bash to write scripts. E.g. in Python this would all be very easy to do. Just start a bunch of threads and e.g. invoke subprocess.run() from them.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel for your script, all the parallel options are ready for you to use and are well documented. It's also packed with features that might take a long time to write into your Python script.

I am trying to use Python by default when writing scripts nowadays, but sometimes the best tool for the job isn't Python or writing your own Python.

Re: GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

#44

Post by bloopernova »

em500 wrote: post #32
ketanmaheshwari wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entirety of GNU Parallel is just one Perl program. It could be copied over and used in a pinch. The installation itself is very simple and no special dependencies or privileges are needed.

Except Perl isn't always present by default either (e.g. in Arch Linux or FreeBSD).

    parallel --embed > parallel.sh
Then store that in your source repo and use it wherever shells are used!

Re: GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

#48

Post by akerl_ »

capableweb wrote: post #42
throwaway277432 wrote: post #33

Is the author still adding the "cite me or pay 10000€" notice to the output? And calling that GPL? And still answering every xargs Stackoverflow question with "you should use GNU Parallel" instead of answering the question? That really gets old quickly when googling for xarg answers. These are just some of the reasons I'll never use parallel. xargs is perfectly fine for most usecases, and it can do everything I need…

> Is the author still adding the "cite me or pay 10000€" notice to the output? And calling that GPL? Where you get the "or pay 10000€" part from? As far as I remember, the software, unless told otherwise, asks authors of scientific papers to cite GNU parallels if they used it when writing their papers. And it doesn't force it, it's not part of the license, but asks you to do so as it's academic tradition to use citat…

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/pa...

"If you pay 10000 EUR you should feel free to use GNU Parallel without citing."

Re: GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

#49

Post by pdimitar »

green-orca wrote: post #34

I'm using task spooler a lot for parallel background processing. What I like the most it the ability to add further tasks to the queue after processing has already started. https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man1/tsp.1.html

Never knew about this, thanks! I'll definitely try it because `parallel` has bitten me before in a few more advanced cases. It has rough edges here and there.

Re: GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

#50

Post by rcxdude »

capableweb wrote: post #42
throwaway277432 wrote: post #33

Is the author still adding the "cite me or pay 10000€" notice to the output? And calling that GPL? And still answering every xargs Stackoverflow question with "you should use GNU Parallel" instead of answering the question? That really gets old quickly when googling for xarg answers. These are just some of the reasons I'll never use parallel. xargs is perfectly fine for most usecases, and it can do everything I need…

> Is the author still adding the "cite me or pay 10000€" notice to the output? And calling that GPL? Where you get the "or pay 10000€" part from? As far as I remember, the software, unless told otherwise, asks authors of scientific papers to cite GNU parallels if they used it when writing their papers. And it doesn't force it, it's not part of the license, but asks you to do so as it's academic tradition to use citat…

The author apparently will think less of you, as made abundantly clear by the tone of the message and especially the comments around it in the code
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