parcat - Man Page

cat files or fifos in parallel

Synopsis

parcat [--rm] [-#] file(s) [-#] file(s)

Description

GNU parcat reads files or fifos in parallel. It writes full lines so there will be no problem with mixed-half-lines which you risk if you use:

   (cat file1 & cat file2 &) | ...

It is faster than doing:

   parallel -j0 --lb cat ::: file*

Arguments can be given on the command line or passed in on stdin (standard input).

Options

-#

Arguments following this will be sent to the file descriptor #. E.g.

  parcat -1 stdout1 stdout2 -2 stderr1 stderr2

will send stdout1 and stdout2 to stdout (standard output = file descriptor 1), and send stderr1 and stderr2 to stderr (standard error = file descriptor 2).

--rm

Remove files after opening. As soon as the files are opened, unlink the files.

Examples

Simple line buffered output

traceroute will often print half a line. If run in parallel, two instances may half-lines of their output. This can be avoided by saving the output to a fifo and then using parcat to read the two fifos in parallel:

  mkfifo freenetproject.org.fifo tange.dk.fifo
  traceroute freenetproject.org > freenetproject.org.fifo &
  traceroute tange.dk > tange.dk.fifo &
  parcat --rm *fifo

Reporting Bugs

GNU parcat is part of GNU parallel. Report bugs to <bug-parallel@gnu.org>.

Author

Copyright (C) 2016-2024 Ole Tange, http://ole.tange.dk and Free Software Foundation, Inc.

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or at your option any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Documentation license I

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this documentation under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license is included in the file LICENSES/GFDL-1.3-or-later.txt.

Documentation license II

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Notice

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A copy of the full license is included in the file as LICENCES/CC-BY-SA-4.0.txt

Dependencies

GNU parcat uses Perl.

See Also

cat(1), parallel(1)

Info

2024-07-27 20240722 parallel