Re: "parallel will behave similar to ..."

[Ole Tange]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Thomas Sattler
<sattler@med.uni-frankfurt.de> wrote:

> | If command is given, GNU parallel will behave
> | similar to xargs.
>
> I think this misleading, as in fact it is more like
> this:
>
>  parallel     <-->  xargs -n 1
>  parallel -m  <-->  xargs
>
> Ole is not sure what'd be the least confusing. He
> suggested to discuss this on the mailinglist, so
> here we are. I think we should mention "-n 1" to
> help people that do not read the entire manpage.

The problem here is that 'parallel foo' is even closer similar to:

  xargs -I {} -P number_of_cores -n1 bash -c 'foo'

By not putting any options in we are simply saying parallel can solve
the same kind of problems as xargs.


/Ole