brain of mat kelcey

mkfifo is one of those shell commands provided as part of coreutils that not many people seem to know about.here's an (semi contrived) example close to something i did the other day to show how awesome it issay you have a number of largish presorted files; run-00 to run-03; and you want to find the most frequent lines. you could do something like the following...sort -m run-* | uniq -c | sort -nr | headhowever you'll know that from previous posts i just loooove keeping all my data compressed on disk so instead i've got run-00.gz to run-03.gzwithout having to...

just recently discovered xargs has a parallelise option!i have 20 files, sample.01.gz to sample.20.gz, each ~100mb in size that i need to run a script overone option iszcat sample*gz | ./script.rb > outputbut this will process the files sequentially on a single core.to get some parallel action going i could generate a temp script that produceszcat sample.01.gz | ./script.rb > sample.01.out &zcat sample.02.gz | ./script.rb > sample.02.out &...zcat sample.20.gz | ./script.rb > sample.20.out &and run that but this will have all 20 running at the same time and produce contention(though with only 20 files this might not be a problem)instead...