问题:

I have a set of servers filled each with a bunch of files that can be gzipped. The servers all have different numbers of cores. How can I write a bash script to launch a gzip for each core and make sure the gzips are not zipping the same file?

回答1:

If you are on Linux, you can use GNU's xargs to launch as many processes as you have cores.

CORES=$(grep -c '^processor' /proc/cpuinfo)
find /source -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 -P $CORES gzip -9

find -print0 / xargs -0 protects you from whitespace in filenames
xargs -n 1 means one gzip process per file
xargs -P specifies the number of jobs
gzip -9 means maximum compression

回答2:

There is an implementation of gzip that is multithreaded, pigz. Since it is compressing one file on multiple threads, it should be able to read from disk more efficiently, compared to compressing multiple files at once.