Advanced parallel processing with xargs and GNU parallel

This section will jump ahead from the basic, and therefore, limited background processing you have seen thus far. You will learn more robust parallel processing with the more capable xargs and Gnu parallel to implement performance-critical Bash code.

Introducing xargs for robust parallel processing

The xargs application is a powerful command-line utility in Linux. It is used to build and execute command lines from standard input. By default, xargs reads items from the standard input and executes the command specified, one or more times, with the input provided. This tool is particularly useful for handling a large number of arguments or for processing items in parallel to improve efficiency.

The basic syntax of xargs is as follows:

command | xargs [options] [command [initial-arguments]]

Here’s a simple example:

$ echo "file1 file2 file3" | xargs rm

In this case, xargs takes the output of echo...