GNU Parallel - News: GNU Parallel 20110622 ('Bean sprout') released

GNU Parallel 20110622 ('Bean sprout') released

Item posted by Ole Tange <tange> on Tue 21 Jun 2011 11:48:16 PM UTC.

GNU Parallel 20110622 ('Bean sprout') has been released. It is available for download at: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parallel/

For sysadmins this is a major release, as --onall makes it easy to run the same commands on a list of computers.

New in this release:

• --onall will run all the jobs on all the computers. This is useful for systemadinistrators having multiple servers.

• --nonall runs like --onall but reads no arguments from stdin (standard input), so is possible to do:

  parallel --nonall -S computer1,computer2 uptime

• Context replace now works with multiple input sources:

  parallel -X echo {1}-{2} ::: 1 2 3 ::: a b c

• --noswap do not start a job on a server that is swapping.

• Article: Parallel processing without Hadoop! http://www.solutionhacker.com/parallel-processing-without-hadoop/

• Article in Linux Magazine (Spanish). Thanks to Ben Martin. http://www.linux-magazine.es/issue/67/

• First blog post in Korean. Thanks to 민병국. http://blog.daum.net/_blog/BlogTypeView.do?blogid=02RQ3&articleno=13380895&admin=#

• Blog post in Japanese. Thanks to Naoya Nakazawa. http://www.sssg.org/blogs/naoya/archives/2003

• Blog post in English. Thanks to Dagon. http://hekate.homeip.net/2011/05/29/

• Bug fixes and man page updates.

About GNU Parallel

GNU Parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel using one or more computers. A job is can be a single command or a small script that has to be run for each of the lines in the input. The typical input is a list of files, a list of hosts, a list of users, a list of URLs, or a list of tables. A job can also be a command that reads from a pipe. GNU Parallel can then split the input and pipe it into commands in parallel.

If you use xargs and tee today you will find GNU Parallel very easy to use as GNU Parallel is written to have the same options as xargs. If you write loops in shell, you will find GNU Parallel may be able to replace most of the loops and make them run faster by running several jobs in parallel. GNU Parallel can even replace nested loops.

GNU Parallel makes sure output from the commands is the same output as you would get had you run the commands sequentially. This makes it possible to use output from GNU Parallel as input for other programs.

You can find more about GNU Parallel at: http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/

Watch the intro video on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpaiGYxkSuQ or at http://tinyogg.com/watch/TORaR/ and http://tinyogg.com/watch/hfxKj/

When using GNU Parallel for a publication please cite:

O. Tange (2011): GNU Parallel - The Command-Line Power Tool, ;login: The USENIX Magazine, February 2011:42-47.

About GNU SQL

GNU sql aims to give a simple, unified interface for accessing databases through all the different databases' command line clients. So far the focus has been on giving a common way to specify login information (protocol, username, password, hostname, and port number), size (database and table size), and running queries.

The database is addressed using a DBURL. If commands are left out you will get that database's interactive shell.

When using GNU SQL for a publication please cite:

O. Tange (2011): GNU SQL - A Command Line Tool for Accessing Different Databases Using DBURLs, ;login: The USENIX Magazine, April 2011:29-32.