Bug 920119 - Weird parallel behaviour due to --tollef
Summary: Weird parallel behaviour due to --tollef
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: parallel
Version: 17
Hardware: Unspecified
OS: Unspecified
unspecified
unspecified
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Golo Fuchert
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2013-03-11 11:48 UTC by Tobias Mueller
Modified: 2013-07-23 18:59 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2013-03-12 21:35:47 UTC
Type: Bug
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Tobias Mueller 2013-03-11 11:48:32 UTC
Description of problem:
for some reason, Fedora ships parallel and sets --tollef by default.
 $ cat /etc/parallel/config 
--tollef

As per the man page:
       --tollef Make GNU parallel behave more like Tollef's parallel command. It
                activates -u, -q, and --arg-sep --. It also causes -l to change
                meaning to --load.

                Not giving '--' is unsupported.

                Do not use --tollef unless you know what you are doing.

                To override use --gnu.



Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

parallel-20121222-1.fc17.noarch : Shell tool for executing jobs in parallel
Repo        : @updates-testing
Matched from:
Filename    : /etc/parallel/config

$ rpm --verify parallel ; echo $?
0


How reproducible:
Try to use almost *any* example from the man page.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. for i in `seq 10`; do touch $i.html; done
2. $ find . -name '*.html' | parallel gzip
gzip: compressed data not written to a terminal. Use -f to force compression.
For help, type: gzip -h

3. $ find . -name '*.html' | parallel --gnu gzip
4. $ ls
10.html.gz  2.html.gz  4.html.gz  6.html.gz  8.html.gz
1.html.gz   3.html.gz  5.html.gz  7.html.gz  9.html.gz


I expected to be able to copy and paste example from the man page, which currently read:
EXAMPLE: Working as xargs -n1. Argument appending
       GNU parallel can work similar to xargs -n1.

       To compress all html files using gzip run:

       find . -name '*.html' | parallel gzip

EXAMPLE: Reading arguments from command line
       GNU parallel can take the arguments from command line instead of stdin
       (standard input). To compress all html files in the current dir using gzip
       run:

       parallel gzip ::: *.html

neither of the examples work.

So I suggest to either rewrite the man page or simply remove that default option.

Comment 1 Golo Fuchert 2013-03-12 21:35:47 UTC
The default option will not be removed in the near future. See [1] for the reason for that decision. So please feel free overwrite it on your mashine in order to get the wanted behaviour of gnu parallel.
It may indeed be a good idea to add a comment about that to the man page. I will look into that.

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=675495

Comment 2 Ville Skyttä 2013-07-23 18:59:12 UTC
See bug 987621


Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.