This is very impressive, and definitely more elegant than my approach. Getting make -j for free was definitely a major plus; before I started using a Python scr

This is very impressive, and definitely more elegant than my approach. Getting make -j for free was definitely a major plus; before I started using a Python script to syntax highlight inline code, my site built in under a second... now it takes around 3. I am honestly surprised to find Python is so slow in terms of start up time. This made me wonder if it was generating / searching for .pyc files, but a quick test revealed this is not the case: sh-4.3$ ls nop.py nop.sh sh-4.3$ hexdump -C nop.py sh-4.3$ hexdump -C nop.sh sh-4.3$ time python3 nop.py real 0m0.064s user 0m0.048s sys 0m0.016s sh-4.3$ time sh nop.sh real 0m0.002s user 0m0.002s sys 0m0.000s sh-4.3$ python3 -m compileall . Listing '.'... Compiling './nop.py'... sh-4.3$ time python3 nop.py real 0m0.062s user 0m0.057s sys 0m0.004s sh-4.3$ python3 __pycache__/nop.cpython-35.pyc sh-4.3$ time python3 __pycache__/nop.cpython-35.pyc real 0m0.060s user 0m0.048s sys 0m0.012s I would add that shell can be surprisingly fast for certain tasks when used correctly. It's very easy to write slow (ba)sh code though, so most shell scripts wind up being fairly non-performent. Edit: formatting.