Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

Making commands quicker by running parallel processes

Computing power constantly increases not only because processors have higher clock cycles but also because they have multiple cores. This means that in a single hardware processor there are multiple logical processors. It's like having several computers, instead of just one.

However, multiple cores are useless unless the software makes use of them. For example, a program that does huge calculations may only run on one core while the others will sit idle. The software has to be aware and take advantage of the multiple cores if we want it to be faster.

In this recipe, we will see how we can make our commands run faster.