Re: Weird behaviour with magic work dir option

[Graeme H]

On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 1:56 AM, Ole Tange <tange@gnu.org> wrote:

That bug was fixed in 20121222. That is also the reason why 'man
parallel' states:

 

Yeah, I thought it'd be something like that. Good to know it's already fixed, I'll just work around it for now, until Ubuntu adopts the updated release.

 

GNU Parallel tries to adhere to POLA. I am not sure if transferring
absolute paths into a stripped dir will adhere to that.

rsync has some magic if you insert ./ into the path. According to man rsync:

    rsync -avR /foo/./bar/baz.c remote:/tmp/

    That would create /tmp/bar/baz.c on the remote machine.

We could adopt that functionality. Would that solve your problem?

Something like that would be very useful, yeah. What I'm trying to accomplish is a script that'll process any file specified on the parallel client side, but that keeps itself confined to the temp dirs on the SSH server side. For now I'll just code it to try and use relative paths, but it'd be very handy to have an explicit way to specify that in parallel. Another solution that might work is that absolute paths on the client side could be translated into relative paths under the --workdir on the processing server side. That's actually the behaviour I was expecting, since it's most likely to work without permission changes to the target system.

Another thing I've noticed is that if I use --basefile, the file ends up in the home dir on the remote system, even if a different --workdir is specified. Is this intended behaviour, or is this just a bug in the older version I'm using?

Thanks!
Graeme