James Youngman wrote:
You can use the "sh -c" trick to run the first argument as the command.
---- Do you think the above case could be optimized? As I mentioned in my inital query, I wanted to avoid shell overhead on 80 thousand sub-jobs. I.e. is there any reason xargs couldn't run the arguments directly -- i.e. taking the first word of input as a program to run and either do a path lookup, OR require an absolute path (either would be fine)
You can use -d to select the delimiter.
---- That will work.. didn't see it would override the normal quote processing... Thanks! I looked at 'parallel' and 'sem' as well, and they want a command on the command line as well... geez... you'd think something would take a list of command in a file and run them in parallel (subject to load constraints) w/o having to run a shell w/each command. Hard to believe such a simple thing wouldn't be an option...but is there any reason why putting a "-I {}" by itself on the command line shouldn't work? (tried "exec", but I guess that is a shell builtin...sigh)...