Making commands quicker by running parallel processes

Computing power has increased a lot over the last couple of years. However, this is not just because of having processors with higher clock cycles; the thing that makes modern processors faster is multiple cores. What this means to the user is in a single hardware processor there are multiple logical processors.

However, the multiple cores are useless unless the software makes use of them. For example, if you have a program that does huge calculations, it will only run on one of the cores, the others will sit idle. The software has to be aware and take advantage of the multiple cores if we want it to be faster.

In this recipe we will see how we can make our commands run faster.

How to do it...

Let us take an example of the md5sum command that we discussed in the previous recipes. This command is CPU-intensive as it has to perform the calculation. Now, if we have more than one file that we want to generate a checksum of, we can run multiple...