GNU Parallel is a handy program to replace loops and perform the loop tasks in parallel. It can also be thought of as a replacement for xargs.

Installation

Mac OS X

Parallel can be easily installed on Mac OS X by downloading and unzipping the source file from the above web site.

Configure with the following line:

./configure --prefix=/path/to/parallel

And run configure, make, and make install.

Finally, add it to your path and to your manpath by adding the following to your .profile or .bash_profile:

# parallel
export PATH="/path/to/parallel/bin:${PATH}"
export MANPATH="/path/to/parallel/share/man:${MANPATH}"

Test it out by typing "which parallel" and "man parallel", both should work.