parallel is like xargs++; for simple cases it does the same thing as xargs, but it also has many more advanced features such as: - Splitting input lines into m

parallel is like xargs++; for simple cases it does the same thing as xargs, but it also has many more advanced features such as: - Splitting input lines into multiple fields and building more complex commands from them - Running jobs on remote nodes - Pausing/resuming batch jobs (--joblog) - ETA and progress bars - Passing data to programs on stdin and generally many, many other ways of distributing and collecting data that xargs can't do You can see a bunch of examples at: https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/man.html https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/man.html $ PAGER=cat man xargs | wc -l 259 $ PAGER=cat man parallel | wc -l 3985