A lot of this comes down to familiarity. I tend to use "make -j 100" for what you're describing. If I write the Makefile carefully [1], it will handle resuming

A lot of this comes down to familiarity. I tend to use "make -j 100" for what you're describing. If I write the Makefile carefully [1], it will handle resuming a half-finished job. I just looked and GNU parallel has a --resume argument which probably does something similar, and maybe with less hassle. But I don't do this often enough—and/or GNU parallel isn't "better enough"—that I'm likely to ever invest the time to learn GNU parallel. btw, oil looks very cool. I hate how many footguns are in common shells. [1] eg writing to a tempfile and atomically renaming into place: "task_with_stdout > $dir/task_id.txt.tmp && mv $dir/task_id.txt{.tmp,}"