Re: Parallelism a la make -j <n> / GNU parallel

[Ben Pfaff]

Colin McEwan <colin.mcewan@gmail.com> writes:

> I frequently find myself these days writing shell scripts, to run on
> multi-core machines, which could easily exploit lots of parallelism (eg. a
> batch of a hundred independent simulations).
>
> The basic parallelism construct of '&' for async execution is highly
> expressive, but it's not useful for this sort of use-case: starting up 100
> jobs at once will leave them competing, and lead to excessive context
> switching and paging.

Autotest testsuites, which are written in Bourne shell, do this
if you pass in a make-like "-j<N>" option.  Have you had a look
at how they are implemented?