There is also an interesting and fun talk to watch by John Graham Cumming from CloudFlare. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woCg2zaIVzQ using Go instead of xargs. Kind of fits into: "Using the right tool for the job". There is no Big Data involved but it shows a sweetspot where it might make sense(make it easier) to not use a shell script (i.e retries, network failure)