Re: User opinion needed: What shell should GNU Parallel use?

[Ole Tange]

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 4:42 PM, Cook, Malcolm <MEC@stowers.org> wrote:

> i'd assumed the commands were not run by any shell but were fork/exec'ed by 
> perl.  So, whether or not $version, $BASHPID or any other variable is defined 
> in such subprocesses would merely depend on whether te were exported from the 
> unix environment in which parallel is invoked.  In other words, different 
> results does not violate POLA here.

One of the reasons a shell is started is to be able to do:

  parallel 'echo * > {}' ::: foo

This would not be possible if a shell was not spawned: Both the * and
the > are interpreted by the shell.

There are other technical reasons why it it needed to spawn a shell,
but that is too detailed to cover here.


/Ole