Right, but it's those remaining 5% of situations where you want parallel execution on multiple remote hosts that make this cool (xargs itself can be replaced 95

Right, but it's those remaining 5% of situations where you want parallel execution on multiple remote hosts that make this cool (xargs itself can be replaced 95% of the time with backticks, for that matter). Combining parallel, pies[1], and shepherd[2] makes for some very cool possibilities, which you can check out with the GNU System Distribution[3], which I've recently migrated all my personal systems to. [1] http://www.gnu.org.ua/software/pies/ http://www.gnu.org.ua/software/pies/ [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/ https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/ [3] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/