Perl or Bash threadpool script?

Question

I have a script - a linear list of commands - that takes a long time to run sequentially. I would like to create a utility script (Perl, Bash or other available on Cygwin) that can read commands from any linear script and farm them out to a configurable number of parallel workers.

So if myscript is

command1
command2
command3

I can run:

threadpool -n 2 myscript

Two threads would be created, one commencing with command1 and the other command2. Whichever thread finishes its first job first would then run command3.

Before diving into Perl (it's been a long time) I thought I should ask the experts if something like this already exists. I'm sure there should be something like this because it would be incredibly useful both for exploiting multi-CPU machines and for parallel network transfers (wget or scp). I guess I don't know the right search terms. Thanks!

Answer 1

If you need the output not to be mixed up (which xargs -P risks doing), then you can use GNU Parallel:

parallel -j2 ::: command1 command2 command3

Or if the commands are in a file:

cat file | parallel -j2

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 || curl pi.dk/3/ || fetch -o - http://pi.dk/3) | bash

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