[ CC += bug-findutils, += Paolo, -= bug-coreutils ] 2009/11/3 Pádraig Brady <p...@draigbrady.com>: > Pádraig Brady wrote: >> Paolo Bonzini wrote: >>> Maybe we want a --parallel option (too bad -p is taken) for xargs that >>> forces the creation of the number of processes passed with -P or taken >>> from nproc (for example by starting "md5sum $1 $5 $9 ...", "md5sum $2 $6 >>> $10 ...", etc.)? >>> That would be an interesting alternative to this core-count proposal... >> >> I'm not sure what you mean here. >> I already suggested to the xargs maintainer that `xargs -P` >> should be equivalent to xargs -P$(nproc). >> `nproc` as an external command would still be useful though. > > Here's a patch for that. > It needs to be updated to reference the new gnulib > when Bruno's nproc update hits gnulib.
I'm sorry, I totally missed this email because although it was sent to me it got buried under a ton of gnulib stuff. As I understand things the intent of the patch is to (optionally I suppose) make xargs keener to keep the CPUs busy (or whatever else we're parallelising over I guess), even if it needs to launch processes with short command lines to do so? That is With -P N, if there are less than N running children and xargs reads an argument it should launch a new child process? If that's the approximate idea, I think that there could be use cases for this. Could we discuss this aspect on bug-findutils instead? Hence I changed the subject and the CC list... Thanks, James.
