Re: Weird behaviour with magic work dir option

[Ole Tange]

On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 11:49 PM, Graeme H <graeme@sudo.ca> wrote:

> I'm trying to get a handle on GNU parallel behaviour, but I'm running into
> some weird behaviour on my Ubuntu 13.04 box (parallel v20121122):
>
> $ parallel --gnu --workdir ... -S localhost pwd ::: ""
> bash: line 0: cd: .parallel/tmp/galvatron-390-1: No such file or directory

That bug was fixed in 20121222. That is also the reason why 'man
parallel' states:

       Your bug report should always include:

       · The output of parallel --version. If you are not running
         the latest released version you should specify why you
         believe the problem is not fixed in that version.

> Additionally, given a list of files passed to parallel, ":::
> /some/path/to/files*", is there some docs that show how absolute paths are
> handled with --trc when transferring to/from servers running the tasks? I'm
> under the impression it'll try to just use the absolute path at the other
> end as the rsync target, but what I'd really like is to have it strip the
> path out when copying, so it just copies to/from workdir/filename.

It transfers them as absolute, so your impression is correct. You can
see what is actually being run with -vv.

GNU Parallel tries to adhere to POLA. I am not sure if transferring
absolute paths into a stripped dir will adhere to that.

rsync has some magic if you insert ./ into the path. According to man rsync:

    rsync -avR /foo/./bar/baz.c remote:/tmp/

    That would create /tmp/bar/baz.c on the remote machine.

We could adopt that functionality. Would that solve your problem?


/Ole