Beta-release of GNU Parallel and have your say

[Ole Tange]

Happy new year, dear users.

In this beta release I have changed the default for -j from -j9 to
-j+0 and implemented distributing arguments between jobslots when
using -X (or -m), so if EOF is hit the last line will be distributed
between the jobslots.

This causes GNU Parallel to become somewhat incompatible with xargs,
but may in practice utilize jobslots better. See the incompatibility
in action here:

seq 1 10 | parallel -j3 -X echo
seq 1 10 | xargs echo

I see this could cause problems in situations where you expect the
last last argument to be the last argument on the line:

(echo file1; echo file2; echo my_dir) | parallel -X mv

The workaround is of course to use -j1 to force it onto a single line:

seq 1 10 | parallel -j1 -X echo
(echo file1; echo file2; echo my_dir) | parallel -j1 -X mv

But do you like that?

Now is your time to vote:

[ ] -j9 - I like -j9 better than -j+0.
[ ] -j+0 - I use -j+0 most of the time so -j+0 as default is great.

[ ] Distributing jobs when using -X is what I want most of the time anyway.
[ ] Xargs compatibility with -X is more important to me.

Download at: http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/parallel/parallel-20110101.tar.bz2

/Ole