No, it actually won't. There are so many tricks and caveats with shell expansions, wildcard handling etc, that regularly old unix hats I know get it wrong (and I've started on Sun OS, probably before half of HN was born).
This is like saying "pointers are nothing, you can learn them in a day" ignoring the obvious fact that the interplay with pointers in a large app is something entirely different than merely understanding indirection, and than even the best kernel/driver/crypto/etc programmers still get pointer related bugs after decades of writing C.
>3. Hell no. Distributions do this job perfectly fine, and you should be able to read the man pages without having read permissions for the binary (since in UNIX you can have 111 as permissions on a binary).
Actually, no, they don't do it at all. One can have 3-4 different versions of a userland program, and never know (unless they explicitly check versions) for which the man page is.
2. GNU Parallel is actually my choice for this, because xargs has a few known issues. Parallel gets the most right, and I used it a lot in my research to run scripts on lots of data.
3. Hell no. Distributions do this job perfectly fine, and you should be able to read the man pages without having read permissions for the binary (since in UNIX you can have 111 as permissions on a binary).