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Comment by JulianWasTaken | Hacker News Reader

moreutils indeed has some great utils, but a minor annoyance it causes is still shipping a `parallel` tool which is relatively useless, but causes confusion for new users or conflict (for package managers) with the way way way more indispensable GNU parallel.

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I was going to comment on this. I still think Joey is in the wrong here.

The Debian BTS thread:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=749355

(I'm still trying to sort out what the resolution was, though it appears divert was used.)

When I installed moreutils v0.67 with macports just now it said:

  moreutils has the following notes:
    The binary parallel is no longer in this port; please install the port parallel instead.

i.e. GNU parallel

Yup, homebrew and other package managers do similar it's what I meant by

> conflict (for package managers)

On the bright side, the moreutils version doesn't have a nag screen.

`parallel` seems redundant because it appears that `xargs -P` can accomplish the same effect, except the "-l maxload" option.

But that’s the point of parallel. The use case is for when you have N processors and a 10Gb NIC. Each job is CPU bound or concurrent license bound, or some jobs may take longer than others. Parallel allows you to run X jobs simultaneously to keep the CPU or licenses busy.

If you mean GNU parallel, it has way way more features than xargs -P, (and a few saner defaults).

See e.g. https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/parallel_tutorial.html

If you mean moreutils parallel, yeah I agree it's not useful.

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