¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Apparently there are two Unix-y ways to run commands in parallel:

• GNU parallel: https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/
• moreutils parallel: https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/

A simple example with wc -l:

GNU receives input from stdin:

find . -type f | parallel wc -l

Moreutils receives input from command-line arguments:

parallel wc -l -- $(find . -type f)

Style aside, the annoyance is that they are not compatible in Debian, Ubuntu and macOS (homebrew), due to both having the parallel executable:

• https://superuser.com/questions/917577/how-can-i-install-gnu-parallel-alongside-moreutils-on-ubuntu-debian
• https://askubuntu.com/questions/1191516/what-happens-to-usr-bin-parallel-if-i-install-the-moreutils-on-top-of-the-paral

Debian thread wherein no consensus is achieved: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=597050

I will stick to moreutils due to its simplicity and richer suite. Nonetheless, it would be better if we didn’t have binary clashes like this. It is really annoying and developer-unfriendly.

Of course, my favorite Linux distributions do not have this issue:

% apk info -L moreutils | grep parallel
usr/bin/parallel-moreutils

…Alpine just installs parallel from moreutils with another name.

Arch Linux does the same:

mv "$pkgdir"/usr/bin/parallel "$pkgdir"/usr/bin/parallel-moreutils

Moreover, GNU Parallel has an annoying citation notice, which the Arch Linux package helpfully removes¹.