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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

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?

tyingq 10y ago
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.
- amelius 10y ago
  Probably a stupid question, but how do the remote machines translate the pathnames to local pathnames? And what happens if they fail?
  - tyingq 10y ago
    The example above is just running in parallel locally.
  - ole_tange 10y ago
    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.
mynewtb 10y ago
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.
ole_tange 10y ago
Did you start by reading the "Reader's guide" which is presented before the first option is introduced in the man page?