Re: feature request: "wait --free-slot" for poor man's parallelization

[Mike Coleman]

On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 7:02 PM, Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> wrote:
> If you start working with compute queues you will find that there are
> endless different ways that people want to define job slots.  It isn't
> a simple problem.

Sure, but for the scenario I have in mind, perfection is not
necessary.  What I'm looking for is a way to utilize my two (or four)
cores for "do it right now" tasks.  It doesn't really matter if I'm
actually running four or eight processes--the situation I'm trying to
avoid is starting up 400, which will swamp my machine.

As for coding it up in a library, yes, that would be possible.  This
isn't nearly as useful as having it under my fingers on every Linux
box I ever encounter (which would happen if the option were added to
wait).  It's kind of like the 'watch' command--very handy, but not
worth the time to install if it's not present on a machine you
encounter.

Obviously, since I'm not offering to code this up, my opinion carries
very little weight.  I was hoping someone might decide they'd like the
feature, too, and add it.  (I suspect that it would actually be a very
small change for someone who knows the bash code.)

Regards,
Mike