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Am I the only person who finds GNU parallel way too complicated? I tried to perform a very easy parallel task with it and spent hours reading the documentation and various tutorials. If a person with Unix command-line skills can't easily pick it up, what's the point of having it?



There do seem to be some very complex use cases. On the other hand, their example of parallel gzip of files seems straightforward:

find . -name '*.html' | parallel gzip --best

Generally, using it in places where you would normally use xargs seems uncomplicated.


Probably a stupid question, but how do the remote machines translate the pathnames to local pathnames? And what happens if they fail?


The example above is just running in parallel locally.


A good start is looking at the section 'Remote execution' in 'man parallel_tutorial'.

Spoiler: You can have GNU Parallel kick the machines if the fail, and rerun the job on another machine.


What was it that you tried to achieve? I find it very easy for trivial parallelisation over files but am quickly lost when it becomes more complex.


Did you start by reading the "Reader's guide" which is presented before the first option is introduced in the man page?




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