You are using --citation in a way it was never designed to be used. This is why you feel it breaks your script. It is like complaining you get control characters in the output if you run 'ls --color=always > output'.
--citation was never designed to be used with any other parameter, but only to be run on its own: parallel --citation : > will cite After running this the citation notice is silenced for future runs. In other words: It takes literally less than 10 seconds to do; thus it is comparable to clicking 'OK, do not show this message again' in a GUI tool. Newer versions print a warning, if you use '--citation' with other arguments, and the man page states: | Print the citation notice and BibTeX entry for GNU parallel, silence | citation notice for all future runs, and exit. It will not run any | commands. The current wording of the citation notice has been cleared by Richard M. Stallman and is deemed not in conflict with https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#RequireCitation because citing is a matter of honor - not law. If you consider yourself an honorable person and you publish peer reviewed articles that uses GNU Parallel, then you should cite. If you consider yourself a dishonorable person and you publish peer reviewed articles that uses GNU Parallel, then you will probably not cite. But if you object to citing, why not do the honorable thing and either build your own tool, fund the project by paying, or simply use another tool? There are plenty other tools; see `man parallel_alternatives`. If you do not publish peer reviewed articles, the notice does not apply to you. Funding a free software project is hard. GNU parallel is no exception. On top of that it seems the less visible a project is, the harder it is to get funding. And the nature of GNU parallel is that it will never be seen by "the guy with the checkbook", but only by the people doing the actual work. This problem has been covered by others - though no solution has been found: https://www.numfocus.org/blog/why-is-numpy-only-now-getting-funded/ As Nadia Eghbal puts it in https://www.slideshare.net/NadiaEghbal/consider-the-maintainer: "Is it alright to compromise, or even deliberately ignore, the happiness of maintainers so we that can enjoy free and open source software?" Before implementing the citation notice it was discussed with the users: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/parallel/2013-11/msg00006.html Having to spend 10 seconds on running 'parallel --citation' once is not an ideal solution, but no one has so far come up with an ideal solution - neither for funding GNU parallel nor other free software. If you believe you have the perfect solution, you should try it out, and if it works, you should post it on the email list. Ideas that will cost work and which have not been tested are, however, unlikely to be prioritized. Running 'parallel --citation' one single time takes less than 10 seconds, and will silence the citation notice for future runs. If that is too much trouble for you, why not use one of the alternatives instead? See a list in: man parallel_alternatives. Citations make it possible to get a job that can pay for the development of GNU Parallel. If you want to see more free software be developed, then help funding it. Citations are a very cheap way of doing that. /Ole
