utility

How much CPU cores does your computer have? 2-8, I think. It’s very time to use them all, isn’t it? But there are plenty of Unix utils such as grep, find, wc etc., which have no idea about parallel data processing. They can’t split their input into 8 pieces and spawn the corresponding number of threads or processes to process it using all the power of your modern CPU.

Definitely, this problem is quite interesting and practical to rest unsolved. According to the Unix philosophy, 1) it is good for programs to do one thing well; 2) it is a good idea to combine simple programs to do complex things. grep do pattern matching well. How about parallelization?

There is an utility know as GNU Parallel which main purpose is to execute arbitrary jobs in parallel on one or even multiple machines. The program is quite complex and multifunctional, look at man and tutorial. Here, I want just to give a little flavor of it.