To not burn up too much CPU GNU parallel sleeps exponentially longer and longer if nothing happens, maxing out at 1 second.
When an incompatibility is found there is often not an easy fix: Fixing the problem in csh often breaks it in bash. In these cases the fix is often to use a small Perl script and call that.
The alias or function will copy the current environment and run the command with GNU parallel in the copy of the environment.
The problem is that you cannot access all of the current environment inside Perl. E.g. aliases, functions and unexported shell variables.
The idea is therefore to take the environment and put it in $PARALLEL_ENV which GNU parallel prepends to every command.
The only way to have access to the environment is directly from the shell, so the program must be written in a shell script that will be sourced and there has to deal with the dialect of the relevant shell.
env_parallel.*
These are the files that implements the alias or function env_parallel for a given shell. It could be argued that these should be put in some obscure place under /usr/lib, but by putting them in your path it becomes trivial to find the path to them and source them:
source `which env_parallel.foo`
The beauty is that they can be put anywhere in the path without the user having to know the location. So if the user's path includes /afs/bin/i386_fc5 or /usr/pkg/parallel/bin or /usr/local/parallel/20161222/sunos5.6/bin the files can be put in the dir that makes most sense for the sysadmin.
env_parallel.bash / env_parallel.sh / env_parallel.ash / env_parallel.dash / env_parallel.zsh / env_parallel.ksh / env_parallel.mksh
env_parallel.(bash|sh|ash|dash|ksh|mksh|zsh) defines the function env_parallel. It uses alias and typeset to dump the configuration (with a few exceptions) into $PARALLEL_ENV before running GNU parallel.
After GNU parallel is finished, $PARALLEL_ENV is deleted.
env_parallel.csh
env_parallel.csh has two purposes: If env_parallel is not an alias: make it into an alias that sets $PARALLEL with arguments and calls env_parallel.csh.
If env_parallel is an alias, then env_parallel.csh uses $PARALLEL as the arguments for GNU parallel.
It exports the environment by writing a variable definition to a file for each variable. The definitions of aliases are appended to this file. Finally the file is put into $PARALLEL_ENV.
GNU parallel is then run and $PARALLEL_ENV is deleted.
env_parallel.fish
First all functions definitions are generated using a loop and functions.
Dumping the scalar variable definitions is harder.
fish can represent non-printable characters in (at least) 2 ways. To avoid problems all scalars are converted to \XX quoting.
Then commands to generate the definitions are made and separated by NUL.
This is then piped into a Perl script that quotes all values. List elements will be appended using two spaces.
Finally \n is converted into \1 because fish variables cannot contain \n. GNU parallel will later convert all \1 from $PARALLEL_ENV into \n.
This is then all saved in $PARALLEL_ENV.
GNU parallel is called, and $PARALLEL_ENV is deleted.
It is also the reason why parset does not work, when data is piped into it: ... | parset ... makes parset start in a subshell, and any changes in environment can therefore not make it back to the calling shell.
While the job sequence number can be computed in advance, the job slot can only be computed the moment a slot becomes available. So it has been implemented as a stack with lazy evaluation: Draw one from an empty stack and the stack is extended by one. When a job is done, push the available job slot back on the stack.
This implementation also means that if you re-run the same jobs, you cannot assume jobs will get the same slots. And if you use remote executions, you cannot assume that a given job slot will remain on the same remote server. This goes double since number of job slots can be adjusted on the fly (by giving --jobs a file name).
GNU parallel does not require protocol 31, so if the rsync version is >= 3.1.0 then --protocol 30 is added to force newer rsyncs to talk to version 2.5.7.
GNU parallel first selects a compression program. If the user has not selected one, the first of these that is in $PATH is used: pzstd lbzip2 pbzip2 zstd pixz lz4 pigz lzop plzip lzip gzip lrz pxz bzip2 lzma xz clzip. They are sorted by speed on a 128 core machine.
Schematically the setup is as follows:
command started by parallel | compress > tmpfile cattail tmpfile | uncompress | parallel which reads the output
The setup is duplicated for both standard output (stdout) and standard error (stderr).
GNU parallel pipes output from the command run into the compression program which saves to a tmpfile. GNU parallel records the pid of the compress program. At the same time a small Perl script (called cattail above) is started: It basically does cat followed by tail -f, but it also removes the tmpfile as soon as the first byte is read, and it continuously checks if the pid of the compression program is dead. If the compress program is dead, cattail reads the rest of tmpfile and exits.
As most compression programs write out a header when they start, the tmpfile in practice is removed by cattail after around 40 ms.
Local: setpriority(0,0,$nice)
cat > {}; $COMMAND {};
perl -e '$bash = shift;
$csh = shift;
for(@ARGV) { unlink;rmdir; }
if($bash =~ s/h//) { exit $bash; }
exit $csh;' "$?h" "$status" {};
{} is set to $PARALLEL_TMP which is a tmpfile. The Perl script saves the exit value, unlinks the tmpfile, and returns the exit value - no matter if the shell is bash/ksh/zsh (using $?) or *csh/fish (using $status).
perl -e '($s,$c,$f) = @ARGV;
# mkfifo $PARALLEL_TMP
system "mkfifo", $f;
# spawn $shell -c $command &
$pid = fork || exec $s, "-c", $c;
open($o,">",$f) || die $!;
# cat > $PARALLEL_TMP
while(sysread(STDIN,$buf,131072)){
syswrite $o, $buf;
}
close $o;
# waitpid to get the exit code from $command
waitpid $pid,0;
# Cleanup
unlink $f;
exit $?/256;' $SHELL -c $COMMAND $PARALLEL_TMP
This is an elaborate way of: mkfifo {}; run $COMMAND in the background using $SHELL; copying STDIN to {}; waiting for background to complete; remove {} and exit with the exit code from $COMMAND.
It is made this way to be compatible with *csh/fish.
< $FILE perl -e 'while(@ARGV) {
sysseek(STDIN,shift,0) || die;
$left = shift;
while($read =
sysread(STDIN,$buf,
($left > 131072 ? 131072 : $left))){
$left -= $read;
syswrite(STDOUT,$buf);
}
}' $STARTPOS $LENGTH
This will read $LENGTH bytes from $FILE starting at $STARTPOS and send it to STDOUT.
ssh $SSHLOGIN "$COMMAND"
ssh $SSHLOGIN mkdir -p ./$WORKDIR;
rsync --protocol 30 -rlDzR \
-essh ./{} $SSHLOGIN:./$WORKDIR;
ssh $SSHLOGIN "$COMMAND"
Read about --protocol 30 in the section Rsync protocol version.
$COMMAND; _EXIT_status=$?; mkdir -p $WORKDIR;
rsync --protocol 30 \
--rsync-path=cd\ ./$WORKDIR\;\ rsync \
-rlDzR -essh $SSHLOGIN:./$FILE ./$WORKDIR;
exit $_EXIT_status;
The --rsync-path=cd ... is needed because old versions of rsync do not support --no-implied-dirs.
The $_EXIT_status trick is to postpone the exit value. This makes it incompatible with *csh and should be fixed in the future. Maybe a wrapping 'sh -c' is enough?
$COMMAND; _EXIT_status=$?; $RETURN;
ssh $SSHLOGIN \(rm\ -f\ ./$WORKDIR/{}\;\
rmdir\ ./$WORKDIR\ \>\&/dev/null\;\);
exit $_EXIT_status;
$_EXIT_status: see --return above.
perl -e 'if(sysread(STDIN, $buf, 1)) {
open($fh, "|-", "@ARGV") || die;
syswrite($fh, $buf);
# Align up to 128k block
if($read = sysread(STDIN, $buf, 131071)) {
syswrite($fh, $buf);
}
while($read = sysread(STDIN, $buf, 131072)) {
syswrite($fh, $buf);
}
close $fh;
exit ($?&127 ? 128+($?&127) : 1+$?>>8)
}' $SHELL -c $COMMAND
This small wrapper makes sure that $COMMAND will never be run if there is no data.
mkfifo tmpfile.tmx; tmux -S <tmpfile.tms> new-session -s pPID -d 'sleep .2' >&/dev/null; tmux -S <tmpfile.tms> new-window -t pPID -n <<shell quoted input>> \(<<shell quoted input>>\)\;\ perl\ -e\ \'while\(\$t++\<3\)\{\ print\ \$ARGV\[0\],\``\\n\''\ \}\'\ \$\?h/\$status\ \>\>\ tmpfile.tmx\&echo\ <<shell double quoted input>>\;echo\ \Job\ finished\ at:\ \`date\`\;sleep\ 10; exec perl -e '$/=``/'';$_=<>;$c=<>;unlink $ARGV; /(\d+)h/ and exit($1);exit$c' tmpfile.tmx
First a FIFO is made (.tmx). It is used for communicating exit value. Next a new tmux session is made. This may fail if there is already a session, so the output is ignored. If all job slots finish at the same time, then tmux will close the session. A temporary socket is made (.tms) to avoid a race condition in tmux. It is cleaned up when GNU parallel finishes.
The input is used as the name of the windows in tmux. When the job inside tmux finishes, the exit value is printed to the FIFO (.tmx). This FIFO is opened by perl outside tmux, and perl then removes the FIFO. Perl blocks until the first value is read from the FIFO, and this value is used as exit value.
To make it compatible with csh and bash the exit value is printed as: $?h/$status and this is parsed by perl.
There is a bug that makes it necessary to print the exit value 3 times.
Another bug in tmux requires the length of the tmux title and command to not have certain limits. When inside these limits, 75 '\ ' are added to the title to force it to be outside the limits.
You can map the bad limits using:
perl -e 'sub r { int(rand(shift)).($_[0] && "\t".r(@_)) } print map { r(@ARGV)."\n" } 1..10000' 1600 1500 90 |
perl -ane '$F[0]+$F[1]+$F[2] < 2037 and print ' |
parallel --colsep '\t' --tagstring '{1}\t{2}\t{3}' tmux -S /tmp/p{%}-'{=3 $_="O"x$_ =}' \
new-session -d -n '{=1 $_="O"x$_ =}' true'\ {=2 $_="O"x$_ =};echo $?;rm -f /tmp/p{%}-O*'
perl -e 'sub r { int(rand(shift)).($_[0] && "\t".r(@_)) } print map { r(@ARGV)."\n" } 1..10000' 17000 17000 90 |
parallel --colsep '\t' --tagstring '{1}\t{2}\t{3}' \
tmux -S /tmp/p{%}-'{=3 $_="O"x$_ =}' new-session -d -n '{=1 $_="O"x$_ =}' true'\ {=2 $_="O"x$_ =};echo $?;rm /tmp/p{%}-O*'
> value.csv 2>/dev/null
R -e 'a<-read.table("value.csv");X11();plot(a[,1],a[,2],col=a[,4]+5,cex=0.1);Sys.sleep(1000)'
For tmux 1.8 17000 can be lowered to 2100.
The interesting areas are title 0..1000 with (title + whole command) in 996..1127 and 9331..9636.
The ordering of the wrapping is important:
nice parallel command ...
will work just fine. But when run remotely, you need to move the nice command so it is being run on the server:
parallel -S server nice command ...
And this will again work just fine, as long as you are running a single command. When you are running a composed command you need nice to apply to the whole command, and it gets harder still:
parallel -S server -q nice bash -c 'command1 ...; cmd2 | cmd3'
It is not impossible, but by using --nice GNU parallel will do the right thing for you. Similarly when transferring files: It starts to get hard when the file names contain space, :, `, *, or other special characters.
To run the commands in a tmux session you basically just need to quote the command. For simple commands that is easy, but when commands contain special characters, it gets much harder to get right.
--compress not only compresses standard output (stdout) but also standard error (stderr); and it does so into files, that are open but deleted, so a crash will not leave these files around.
--cat and --fifo are easy to do by hand, until you want to clean up the tmpfile and keep the exit code of the command.
The real killer comes when you try to combine several of these: Doing that correctly for all corner cases is next to impossible to do by hand.
Unfortunately Perl is rather slow at computing the hash value (and somewhat slow at splitting into columns).
One solution is to use a compiled language for the splitting and hashing, but that would go against the design criteria of not depending on a compiler.
Luckily those tasks can be parallelized. So GNU parallel starts n sharders that do step 2-6, and passes blocks of 100k to each of those in a round robin manner. To make sure these sharders compute the hash the same way, $PERL_HASH_SEED is set to the same value for all sharders.
Running n sharders poses a new problem: Instead of having n outputs (one for each computed value) you now have n outputs for each of the n values, so in total n*n outputs; and you need to merge these n*n outputs together into n outputs.
This can be done by simply running 'parallel -j0 --lb cat ::: outputs_for_one_value', but that is rather inefficient, as it spawns a process for each file. Instead the core code from 'parcat' is run, which is also a bit faster.
All the sharders and parcats communicate through named pipes that are unlinked as soon as they are opened.
From version 20150122 GNU parallel tries both the ()-version and the %%-version, and the function definition works on both pre- and post-shell shock versions of bash.
Ctrl-C and standard error (stderr)
If the user presses Ctrl-C the user expects jobs to stop. This works out of the box if the jobs are run locally. Unfortunately it is not so simple if the jobs are run remotely.
If remote jobs are run in a tty using ssh -tt, then Ctrl-C works, but all output to standard error (stderr) is sent to standard output (stdout). This is not what the user expects.
If remote jobs are run without a tty using ssh (without -tt), then output to standard error (stderr) is kept on stderr, but Ctrl-C does not kill remote jobs. This is not what the user expects.
So what is needed is a way to have both. It seems the reason why Ctrl-C does not kill the remote jobs is because the shell does not propagate the hang-up signal from sshd. But when sshd dies, the parent of the login shell becomes init (process id 1). So by exec'ing a Perl wrapper to monitor the parent pid and kill the child if the parent pid becomes 1, then Ctrl-C works and stderr is kept on stderr.
To be able to kill all (grand)*children a new process group is started.
--nice
niceing the remote process is done by setpriority(0,0,$nice). A few old systems do not implement this and --nice is unsupported on those.
Setting $PARALLEL_TMP
$PARALLEL_TMP is used by --fifo and --cat and must point to a non-exitent file in $TMPDIR. This file name is computed on the remote system.
The wrapper
The wrapper looks like this:
$shell = $PARALLEL_SHELL || $SHELL;
$tmpdir = $TMPDIR;
$nice = $opt::nice;
# Set $PARALLEL_TMP to a non-existent file name in $TMPDIR
do {
$ENV{PARALLEL_TMP} = $tmpdir."/par".
join"", map { (0..9,"a".."z","A".."Z")[rand(62)] } (1..5);
} while(-e $ENV{PARALLEL_TMP});
$SIG{CHLD} = sub { $done = 1; };
$pid = fork;
unless($pid) {
# Make own process group to be able to kill HUP it later
setpgrp;
eval { setpriority(0,0,$nice) };
exec $shell, "-c", ($bashfunc."@ARGV");
die "exec: $!\n";
}
do {
# Parent is not init (ppid=1), so sshd is alive
# Exponential sleep up to 1 sec
$s = $s < 1 ? 0.001 + $s * 1.03 : $s;
select(undef, undef, undef, $s);
} until ($done || getppid == 1);
# Kill HUP the process group if job not done
kill(SIGHUP, -${pid}) unless $done;
wait;
exit ($?&127 ? 128+($?&127) : 1+$?>>8)
The function env_parallel copies the full current environment into the environment variable PARALLEL_ENV. This variable is picked up by GNU parallel and used to create the Perl script mentioned above.
When the line to run is > 1000 chars, GNU parallel therefore encodes the line to run. The encoding bzip2s the line to run, converts this to base64, splits the base64 into 1000 char blocks (so csh does not fail), and prepends it with this Perl script that decodes, decompresses and evals the line.
@GNU_Parallel=("use","IPC::Open3;","use","MIME::Base64");
eval "@GNU_Parallel";
$SIG{CHLD}="IGNORE";
# Search for bzip2. Not found => use default path
my $zip = (grep { -x $_ } "/usr/local/bin/bzip2")[0] || "bzip2";
# $in = stdin on $zip, $out = stdout from $zip
my($in, $out,$eval);
open3($in,$out,">&STDERR",$zip,"-dc");
if(my $perlpid = fork) {
close $in;
$eval = join "", <$out>;
close $out;
} else {
close $out;
# Pipe decoded base64 into 'bzip2 -dc'
print $in (decode_base64(join"",@ARGV));
close $in;
exit;
}
wait;
eval $eval;
Perl and bzip2 must be installed on the remote system, but a small test showed that bzip2 is installed by default on all platforms that runs GNU parallel, so this is not a big problem.
The added bonus of this is that much bigger environments can now be transferred as they will be below bash's limit of 131072 chars.
GNU parallel tries hard to use the right shell. If GNU parallel is called from tcsh it will use tcsh. If it is called from bash it will use bash. It does this by looking at the (grand)*parent process: If the (grand)*parent process is a shell, use this shell; otherwise look at the parent of this (grand)*parent. If none of the (grand)*parents are shells, then $SHELL is used.
This will do the right thing if called from:
While these cover most cases, there are situations where it will fail:
zsh% bash -c "parallel 'echo {} is not run in bash; \
set | grep BASH_VERSION' ::: This"
You can work around that by appending '&& true':
zsh% bash -c "parallel 'echo {} is run in bash; \
set | grep BASH_VERSION' ::: This && true"
#!/usr/bin/perl
system("parallel",'setenv a {}; echo $a',":::",2);
Here it depends on which shell is used to call the Perl script. If the Perl script is called from tcsh it will work just fine, but if it is called from bash it will fail, because the command setenv is not known to bash.
If GNU parallel guesses wrong in these situation, set the shell using $PARALLEL_SHELL.
parallel "grep -E 'ls | wc >> c' {}" ::: foo
could be run as:
system("grep","-E","ls | wc >> c","foo");
However, as soon as the command is a bit more complex a shell must be spawned:
parallel "grep -E 'ls | wc >> c' {} | wc >> c" ::: foo
parallel "LANG=C grep -E 'ls | wc >> c' {}" ::: foo
It is impossible to tell the difference between these without parsing the string (is the | a pipe in shell or an alternation in a grep regexp? Is LANG=C a command in csh or setting a variable in bash? Is >> redirection or part of a regexp?).
On top of this wrapper scripts will often require a shell to be spawned.
The downside is that you need to quote special shell chars twice:
parallel echo '*' ::: This will expand the asterisk parallel echo "'*'" ::: This will not parallel "echo '*'" ::: This will not parallel echo '\*' ::: This will not parallel echo \''*'\' ::: This will not parallel -q echo '*' ::: This will not
-q will quote all special chars, thus redirection will not work: this prints '* > out.1' and does not save '*' into the file out.1:
parallel -q echo "*" ">" out.{} ::: 1
GNU parallel tries to live up to Principle Of Least Astonishment (POLA), and the requirement of using -q is hard to understand, when you do not see the whole picture.
For tcsh/csh newline is quoted as \ followed by newline. Other special characters are also \-quoted.
For rc everything is quoted using '.
With --pipe GNU parallel reads the blocks from standard input (stdin), which is then given to the command on standard input (stdin); so every block is being processed by GNU parallel itself. This is the reason why --pipe maxes out at around 500 MB/sec.
--pipepart, on the other hand, first identifies at which byte positions blocks start and how long they are. It does that by seeking into the file by the size of a block and then reading until it meets end of a block. The seeking explains why GNU parallel does not know the line number and why -L/-l and -N do not work.
With a reasonable block and file size this seeking is more than 1000 time faster than reading the full file. The byte positions are then given to a small script that reads from position X to Y and sends output to standard output (stdout). This small script is prepended to the command and the full command is executed just as if GNU parallel had been in its normal mode. The script looks like this:
< file perl -e 'while(@ARGV) {
sysseek(STDIN,shift,0) || die;
$left = shift;
while($read = sysread(STDIN,$buf,
($left > 131072 ? 131072 : $left))){
$left -= $read; syswrite(STDOUT,$buf);
}
}' startbyte length_in_bytes
It delivers 1 GB/s per core.
Instead of the script dd was tried, but many versions of dd do not support reading from one byte to another and might cause partial data. See this for a surprising example:
yes | dd bs=1024k count=10 | wc
GNU parallel will waste CPU power if --block-size does not contain a full record, because it tries to find a full record and will fail to do so. The recommendation is therefore to use a --block-size > 2 records, so you always get at least one full record when you read one block.
If you use -N then --block-size should be big enough to contain N+1 records.
This can be done because --pipepart reads from files, and we can compute the total size of the input.
GNU parallel lets --jobs represent the number of servers to run on in parallel. This is to make it possible to run a sequence of commands (that cannot be parallelized) on each server, but run the same sequence on multiple servers.
a,b,c a," a,b,c a,b,c a,b,c ",c a,b,c
Here the second record contains a multi-line field that looks like records. Since --pipepart does not read then whole file when searching for record endings, it may start reading in this multi-line field, which would be wrong.
GNU parallel buffers on disk in $TMPDIR using files, that are removed as soon as they are created, but which are kept open. So even if GNU parallel is killed by a power outage, there will be no files to clean up afterwards. Another advantage is that the file system is aware that these files will be lost in case of a crash, so it does not need to sync them to disk.
It gives the odd situation that a disk can be fully used, but there are no visible files on it.
Partly buffering in memory
When using output formats SQL and CSV then GNU Parallel has to read the whole output into memory. When run normally it will only read the output from a single job. But when using --linebuffer every line printed will also be buffered in memory - for all jobs currently running.
If memory is tight, then do not use the output format SQL/CSV with --linebuffer.
Comparing to buffering in memory
gargs is a parallelizing tool that buffers in memory. It is therefore a useful way of comparing the advantages and disadvantages of buffering in memory to buffering on disk.
On an system with 6 GB RAM free and 6 GB free swap these were tested with different sizes:
echo /dev/zero | gargs "head -c $size {}" >/dev/null
echo /dev/zero | parallel "head -c $size {}" >/dev/null
The results are here:
JobRuntime Command
0.344 parallel_test 1M
0.362 parallel_test 10M
0.640 parallel_test 100M
9.818 parallel_test 1000M
23.888 parallel_test 2000M
30.217 parallel_test 2500M
30.963 parallel_test 2750M
34.648 parallel_test 3000M
43.302 parallel_test 4000M
55.167 parallel_test 5000M
67.493 parallel_test 6000M
178.654 parallel_test 7000M
204.138 parallel_test 8000M
230.052 parallel_test 9000M
255.639 parallel_test 10000M
757.981 parallel_test 30000M
0.537 gargs_test 1M
0.292 gargs_test 10M
0.398 gargs_test 100M
3.456 gargs_test 1000M
8.577 gargs_test 2000M
22.705 gargs_test 2500M
123.076 gargs_test 2750M
89.866 gargs_test 3000M
291.798 gargs_test 4000M
GNU parallel is pretty much limited by the speed of the disk: Up to 6 GB data is written to disk but cached, so reading is fast. Above 6 GB data are both written and read from disk. When the 30000MB job is running, the disk system is slow, but usable: If you are not using the disk, you almost do not feel it.
gargs has a speed advantage up until 2500M where it hits a wall. Then the system starts swapping like crazy and is completely unusable. At 5000M it goes out of memory.
You can make GNU parallel behave similar to gargs if you point $TMPDIR to a tmpfs-filesystem: It will be faster for small outputs, but may kill your system for larger outputs and cause you to lose output.
But when reading multiple input sources GNU parallel keeps the already read values for generating all combinations with other input sources.
The language Perl was chosen because GNU parallel is written in Perl and it was easy and reasonably fast to run the code given by the user.
If a user needs the same programmed replacement string again and again, the user may want to make his own shorthand for it. This is what --rpl is for. It works so well, that even GNU parallel's own shorthands are implemented using --rpl.
In Perl code the bigrams {= and =} rarely exist. They look like a matching pair and can be entered on all keyboards. This made them good candidates for enclosing the Perl expression in the replacement strings. Another candidate ,, and ,, was rejected because they do not look like a matching pair. --parens was made, so that the users can still use ,, and ,, if they like: --parens ,,,,
Internally, however, the {= and =} are replaced by \257< and \257>. This is to make it simpler to make regular expressions. You only need to look one character ahead, and never have to look behind.
If GNU parallel should adopt a real testing framework then those elements would be important.
Since many tests are dependent on which hardware it is running on, these tests break when run on a different hardware than what the test was written for.
When most bugs are fixed a test is added, so this bug will not reappear. It is, however, sometimes hard to create the environment in which the bug shows up - especially if the bug only shows up sometimes. One of the harder problems was to make a machine start swapping without forcing it to its knees.
To avoid keeping all run times in memory, an implementation of remedian was made (Rousseeuw et al).
Unfortunately it is not always possible to predict the root cause of the error.
On ark.intel.com Intel uses the terms cores and threads for number of physical cores and the number of hyperthreaded cores respectively.
GNU parallel uses uses CPUs as the number of compute units and the terms sockets, cores, and threads to specify how the number of compute units is calculated.
As remote calculation of load can be slow, a process is spawned to run ps and put the result in a file, which is then used next time.
The DBURL must point to a table name. The table will be dropped and created. The reason for not reusing an existing table is that the user may have added more input sources which would require more columns in the table. By prepending '+' to the DBURL the table will not be dropped.
The table columns are similar to joblog with the addition of V1 .. Vn which are values from the input sources, and Stdout and Stderr which are the output from standard output and standard error, respectively.
The Signal column has been renamed to _Signal due to Signal being a reserved word in MySQL.
This problem has been covered by others - though no solution has been found: https://www.slideshare.net/NadiaEghbal/consider-the-maintainer https://www.numfocus.org/blog/why-is-numpy-only-now-getting-funded/
Before implementing the citation notice it was discussed with the users: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/parallel/2013-11/msg00006.html
Having to spend 10 seconds on running parallel --citation once is no doubt not an ideal solution, but no one has so far come up with an ideal solution - neither for funding GNU parallel nor other free software.
If you believe you have the perfect solution, you should try it out, and if it works, you should post it on the email list. Ideas that will cost work and which have not been tested are, however, unlikely to be prioritized.
Running parallel --citation one single time takes less than 10 seconds, and will silence the citation notice for future runs. This is comparable to graphical tools where you have to click a checkbox saying ``Do not show this again''. But if that is too much trouble for you, why not use one of the alternatives instead? See a list in: man parallel_alternatives.
As the request for citation is not a legal requirement this is acceptable under GPLv3 and cleared with Richard M. Stallman himself. Thus it does not fall under this: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#RequireCitation
It ought to be possible to write a filter that removed rec sep on the fly instead of inside GNU parallel. This could then use more cpus.
Will that require 2x record size memory?
Will that require 2x block size memory?
--tollef was included to make GNU parallel switch compatible with the parallel from moreutils (which is made by Tollef Fog Heen). This was done so that users of that parallel easily could port their use to GNU parallel: Simply set PARALLEL=``--tollef'' and that would be it.
But several distributions chose to make --tollef global (by putting it into /etc/parallel/config) without making the users aware of this, and that caused much confusion when people tried out the examples from GNU parallel's man page and these did not work. The users became frustrated because the distribution did not make it clear to them that it has made --tollef global.
So to lessen the frustration and the resulting support, --tollef was obsoleted 20130222 and removed one year later.
echo $SHELL | grep ``/t\{0,1\}csh'' > /dev/null && setenv VAR foo || export VAR=foo