Shell Scripting: Using xargs to execute parallel instances of a shell function

Question

I'm trying to use xargs in a shell script to run parallel instances of a function I've defined in the same script. The function times the fetching of a page, and so it's important that the pages are actually fetched concurrently in parallel processes, and not in background processes (if my understanding of this is wrong and there's negligible difference between the two, just let me know).

The function is:

function time_a_url ()
{
     oneurltime=$($time_command -p wget -p $1 -O /dev/null 2>&1 1>/dev/null | grep real | cut -d" " -f2)
     echo "Fetching $1 took $oneurltime seconds."
}

How does one do this with an xargs pipe in a form that can take number of times to run time_a_url in parallel as an argument? And yes, I know about GNU parallel, I just don't have the privilege to install software where I'm writing this.

Answer 1

Here's a demo of how you might be able to get your function to work:

$ f() { echo "[$@]"; }
$ export -f f
$ echo -e "b 1\nc 2\nd 3 4" | xargs -P 0 -n 1 -I{} bash -c f\ \{\}
[b 1]
[d 3 4]
[c 2]

The keys to making this work are to export the function so the bash that xargs spawns will see it and to escape the space between the function name and the escaped braces. You should be able to adapt this to work in your situation. You'll need to adjust the arguments for -P and -n (or remove them) to suit your needs.

You can probably get rid of the grep and cut. If you're using the Bash builtin time, you can specify an output format using the TIMEFORMAT variable. If you're using GNU /usr/bin/time, you can use the --format argument. Either of these will allow you to drop the -p also.

You can replace this part of your wget command: 2>&1 1>/dev/null with -q. In any case, you have those reversed. The correct order would be >/dev/null 2>&1.

Answer 2

On Mac OS X:

xargs: max. processes must be >0 (for: xargs -P [>0])

f() { echo "[$@]"; }
export -f f

echo -e "b 1\nc 2\nd 3 4" | sed 's/ /\\ /g' | xargs -P 10 -n 1 -I{} bash -c f\ \{\}

echo -e "b 1\nc 2\nd 3 4" | xargs -P 10 -I '{}' bash -c 'f "$@"' arg0 '{}'