There's no need for special logic in grep to run parallel grep's.
The "parallel" command can handle that for you. For example, on the 12 core, 24 thread Ryzen CPU that I am using: find $HOME -xdev -type f -ctime -333 | wc -l ## counts 136126 files. find $HOME -xdev -type f -ctime -333 | parallel -m grep -l foobar | wc -l ## takes about 13 seconds find $HOME -xdev -type f -ctime -333 | xargs -d '\n' grep -l foobar | wc -l ## takes about 52 seconds The above parallel invocation ran 24 grep commands in parallel, and took about 1/4 the time, otherwise performing rather like xargs, which ran one grep command at a time. (Granted, reading either the 'parallel' or 'xargs' man pages is not easy <grin>.) -- Paul Jackson p...@usa.net