Oh, I've seen the --tollef option in the help doc, but I still didn't realize there was a complete alternative to gnu parallel. Definitely will have to try.

Mr. Hess makes a lot of good points, most I think I agree with, so I can sympathize with his frustration.

The point about transferring files seems interesting. I haven't used gnu parallel in remote/ssh mode aside from simple tests, but that seems wicked useful for some situations. Is there a real and simple alternative to running gnu parallel on multiple remote hosts? Is that something the moreutils version can also do?

For the pure SSH/SCP example there is PSSH/PSCP:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pssh/2.2

rdist I believe can operate in parallel as well.

Beyond this, devops tools e.g. ansible/puppet, etc. but they require a bit more or alot more setup, depending on the tool.

The pypi page for pssh links to an old (dead?) Google Code repository. Do you know if the project is still being maintained?

For most uses I find that ansible ad-hoc commands give a nice balance -- just a tiny bit of learning curve, and only a little bit different than typing the single SSH command that you want to run.

http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/intro_adhoc.html

There’s also Rust Parallel[1]. It’s really fast, so it makes sense to use even for very quick things (but you might be running a lot so it adds up).

Overall it has become my preferred Parallel implementation.

[1] https://github.com/mmstick/parallel