Simple tutorial to install & use GNU Parallel

How to install GNU Parallel on Centos / RHEL servers.

You are here because you know the power of GNU parallel.. here are simple steps to install & use it.

Download Latest version of GNU Parallel

Unzip it, it creates a new folder parallel-yyyymmdd

$ sudo tar xjf parallel-latest.tar.bz2

Change to new folder

$ cd parallel-yyyymmdd

Build the software in your machine

$ sudo ./configure && make

Install it

$ sudo make install

Switch to home directory

$ cd

How to Test Parallel ?

$ parallel

Press Ctrl D or Ctrl C to exit the parallel.

Use Case

The common use case I have is to bzip a large file using Parallels. Files with 40 millions rows (8 GB) are compressed to 400MB bz2 files.

$ cat largefile.csv | /usr/local/bin/parallel — pipe -k bzip2 — best > largefile.bz2