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.
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
See bug 987621