GNU Parallel 20190322 Released - Wants To Help Speed Up Single-Threaded Linux Commands

GNU Parallel is a tool for carrying out multiple commands/jobs in parallel on one or more computers. Out today is the GNU Parallel 20190322 release with a few changes over last month's update.

The primary change of GNU Parallel 20190322 is using SIGHUP rather than SIGTERM to allow for running jobs to finish and they have also changed their 'SIGTERM SIGTERM' behavior for killing of running jobs. Additionally, they have added some "cheat sheet" documentation for helping new users understand this utility.

The release notes also advertise that new in this release is the ability to use multiple CPU cores for running single-threaded Linux commands. Though when looking at the Git log there doesn't appear to be anything actually new on that front in this release. It's still possible for pairing various common (single-threaded) Linux commands with Parallel to speed-up different operations on today's multi-core systems. For details on how that can be achieved can be found via this blog post. It would be nice though if they made various wrappers to automatically exploit this behavior transparent to the user.

More details on this new GNU Parallel release can be found via savannah.gnu.org.