Parallel a script

[yacob sen]

Dear All,

I have a small script that feeds a file name to a program and then the program start to run once it gets the file name and output the results in the directory that runs.  I have ubuntu 10.04 laptop with 64 bit with 4 cores. I want to parallel the script so that it can run at once at least in four of the processes and continue once those jobs are finished. I have at least 30 files in a given month.

The script is simple and it looks like this:

for file in  *.a

......

......

do

prog -i $file -type s 

done

Here the executable program "prog" needs the file name as input after the "-i" option. I do not have also control  over the output files. It output the results in the directory I run. 

Is it possible to use gnu parallel for this type of jobs. 

Kind regards

Yacob