[Discuss] GNU xargs trick

[Rich Pieri]

There is a trick to GNU xargs that lets you easily parallelize
processes. The particular use I discovered is for optimizing directories
full of PNG files using optipng. I first looked at GNU parallel but it's
way overkill for what I want. I found a couple of scripts that do some
tricks with & and lock files but those ran into problems with
complex-ish commands. Then I learned about the xargs trick:

find . -name "*.png" -print | xargs -I{} -P 4 optipng -o1 -preserve {}

The find part should be obvious, xargs maybe not so much. -I enables
substitution. Whenever the string following -I appears it is replaced
with the the line from stdin. -P 4 says to run a maximum of 4 processes;
the default is 1. Everything after is the optipng command with {}
replaced with each line from the find command.

I dunnow if this has ever come up on the list but it's been quiet lately
and I figured it's a cool enough trick to share.

-- 
Rich P.