rust-parallel

Command-line utility to execute commands in parallel and aggregate their output.

Similar to GNU Parallel or xargs with -n1 option but implemented in rust.

Being written in asynchronous rust it is quite fast - see benchmarks.

Goals:

• Use only safe rust.
• Use only asynchronous operations supported by tokio, do not use any blocking operations.
• Support arbitrarily large number of input lines, avoid O(number of input lines) memory usage. In support of this:
  • tokio::sync::Semaphore is used carefully to limit the number of commands that run concurrently. Do not spawn tasks for all input lines immediately to limit memory usage.
• Support running commands on local machine only, not on remote machines.

Tech Stack:

• anyhow used for application error handling to propogate and format fatal errors.
• clap command line argument parser.
• tokio asynchronous runtime for rust. From tokio this app uses:
  • async / await functions (aka coroutines)
  • Singleton CommandLineArgs instance using tokio::sync::OnceCell.
  • Asynchronous command execution using tokio::process::Command
  • tokio::sync::Semaphore used to limit number of commands that run concurrently.
    • Life would be a bit easier if acquire_many took a usize parameter: https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio/issues/4446
  • tokio::sync::Mutex used to protect access to stdout/stderr to prevent interleaved command output.
• tracing used for debug and warning logs.

Installation:

1. Install Rust
2. Install the latest version of this app from crates.io: $ cargo install rust-parallel

Usage:

``` Run commands in parallel

Usage: rust-parallel [OPTIONS] [COMMANDANDINITIAL_ARGUMENTS]...

Arguments: [COMMANDANDINITIAL_ARGUMENTS]... Optional command and initial arguments to run for each input line

Options: -j, --jobs Maximum number of commands to run in parallel, defauts to num cpus [default: 8] -i, --inputs Input file or - for stdin. Defaults to stdin if no inputs are specified -n, --null-separator Use null separator for reading input instead of newline -h, --help Print help information -V, --version Print version information ```

Demos:

Small demo of 5 echo commands. With -j5 all 5 commands are run in parallel. With -j1 commands are run sequentially:

``` $ cat >./test <

$ cat test | rust-parallel -j5 are hi there how you

cat test | rust-parallel -j1 hi there how are you ```

Specifying command and intial arguments on command line:

head -100 /usr/share/dict/words | rust-parallel md5 -s MD5 ("aal") = ff45e881572ca2c987460932660d320c MD5 ("A") = 7fc56270e7a70fa81a5935b72eacbe29 MD5 ("aardvark") = 88571e5d5e13a4a60f82cea7802f6255 MD5 ("aalii") = 0a1ea2a8d75d02ae052f8222e36927a5 MD5 ("aam") = 35c2d90f7c06b623fe763d0a4e5b7ed9 MD5 ("aa") = 4124bc0a9335c27f086f24ba207a4912 MD5 ("a") = 0cc175b9c0f1b6a831c399e269772661 MD5 ("Aani") = e9b22dd6213c3d29648e8ad7a8642f2f MD5 ("Aaron") = 1c0a11cc4ddc0dbd3fa4d77232a4e22e MD5 ("aardwolf") = 66a4a1a2b442e8d218e8e99100069877

Working on a set of files from find command. The -n option works nicely with find -print0 to handle filenames with newline or whitespace characters:

find . -type f -print0 | rust-parallel -n gzip -f -k

Using awk to form complete commands:

$ head -100 /usr/share/dict/words | awk '{printf "md5 -s %s\n", $1}' | rust-parallel MD5 ("Abba") = 5fa1e1f6e07a6fea3f2bb098e90a8de2 MD5 ("abaxial") = ac3a53971d52d9ce3277eadf03f13a5e MD5 ("abaze") = 0b08c52aa63d947b6a5601ee975bc3a4 MD5 ("abaxile") = 21f5fc27d7d34117596e41d8c001087e MD5 ("abbacomes") = 76640eb0c929bc97d016731bfbe9a4f8 MD5 ("abbacy") = 08aeac72800adc98d2aba540b6195921 MD5 ("Abbadide") = 7add1d6f008790fa6783bc8798d8c803 MD5 ("abb") = ea01e5fd8e4d8832825acdd20eac5104

Using as part of a shell pipeline. stdout and stderr from each command run are copied to stdout/stderr of the rust-parallel process.

$ head -100 /usr/share/dict/words | rust-parallel md5 -s | grep -i abba MD5 ("Abba") = 5fa1e1f6e07a6fea3f2bb098e90a8de2 MD5 ("abbacomes") = 76640eb0c929bc97d016731bfbe9a4f8 MD5 ("abbacy") = 08aeac72800adc98d2aba540b6195921 MD5 ("Abbadide") = 7add1d6f008790fa6783bc8798d8c803