Running programs in parallel using xargs

Question

I currently have the current script.

#!/bin/bash
# script.sh

for i in {0..99}; do
   script-to-run.sh input/ output/ $i
done

I wish to run it in parallel using xargs. I have tried

script.sh | xargs -P8

But doing the above only executed once at the time. No luck with -n8 as well. Adding & at the end of the line to be executed in the script for loop would try to run the script 99 times at once. How do I execute the loop only 8 at the time, up to 100 total.

Answer 1

From the xargs man page:

This manual page documents the GNU version of xargs. xargs reads items from the standard input, delimited by blanks (which can be protected with double or single quotes or a backslash) or newlines, and executes the command (default is /bin/echo) one or more times with any initial- arguments followed by items read from standard input. Blank lines on the standard input are ignored.

Which means that for your example xargs is waiting and collecting all of the output from your script and then running echo <that output>. Not exactly all that useful nor what you wanted.

The -n argument is how many items from the input to use with each command that gets run (nothing, by itself, about parallelism here).

To do what you want with xargs you would need to do something more like this (untested):

printf %s\\n {0..99} | xargs -n 1 -P 8 script-to-run.sh input/ output/

Which breaks down like this.

• printf %s\\n {0..99} - Print one number per-line from 0 to 99.
• Run xargs
  • taking at most one argument per run command line
  • and run up to eight processes at a time

Answer 2

With GNU Parallel you would do:

parallel script-to-run.sh input/ output/ {} ::: {0..99}

Add in -P8 if you do not want to run one job per CPU core.

Opposite xargs it will do The Right Thing, even if the input contain space, ', or " (not the case here, though). It also makes sure the output from different jobs are not mixed together, so if you use the output you are guaranteed that you will not get half-a-line from two different jobs.

GNU Parallel is a general parallelizer and makes is easy to run jobs in parallel on the same machine or on multiple machines you have ssh access to.

If you have 32 different jobs you want to run on 4 CPUs, a straight forward way to parallelize is to run 8 jobs on each CPU:

GNU Parallel instead spawns a new process when one finishes - keeping the CPUs active and thus saving time:

Installation

If GNU Parallel is not packaged for your distribution, you can do a personal installation, which does not require root access. It can be done in 10 seconds by doing this:

$ (wget -O - pi.dk/3 || lynx -source pi.dk/3 || curl pi.dk/3/ || \
   fetch -o - http://pi.dk/3 ) > install.sh
$ sha1sum install.sh | grep 3374ec53bacb199b245af2dda86df6c9
12345678 3374ec53 bacb199b 245af2dd a86df6c9
$ md5sum install.sh | grep 029a9ac06e8b5bc6052eac57b2c3c9ca
029a9ac0 6e8b5bc6 052eac57 b2c3c9ca
$ sha512sum install.sh | grep f517006d9897747bed8a4694b1acba1b
40f53af6 9e20dae5 713ba06c f517006d 9897747b ed8a4694 b1acba1b 1464beb4
60055629 3f2356f3 3e9c4e3c 76e3f3af a9db4b32 bd33322b 975696fc e6b23cfb
$ bash install.sh

For other installation options see http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parallel.git/tree/README

Learn more

See more examples: http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/man.html

Watch the intro videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL284C9FF2488BC6D1

Walk through the tutorial: http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/parallel_tutorial.html

Sign up for the email list to get support: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/parallel