I'm not sure if this is my own misunderstanding of --pipe or bugs, but maybe somebody can help me. I'm using version 20111122 on CentOS 5.6 x86-64.
First, if I forget the job, I get a weird message and parallel hangs: $ seq -w 10 | parallel --pipe Deep recursion on subroutine "CommandLineQueue::get" at /usr/bin/parallel line 4190. Second, it seems to be launching jobs for input blocks that don't exist; the number of times the 'EOF' marker gets printed below changes from run to run: $ echo EOF > marker.txt $ seq -w 10 | parallel --pipe --block-size 3 cat - marker.txt 01 EOF 02 EOF 03 EOF 04 EOF 05 EOF 06 EOF 07 EOF 08 EOF 09 EOF EOF 10 EOF EOF EOF EOF EOF EOF EOF EOF EOF EOF EOF EOF EOF EOF EOF This is a 16-processor machine; the same thing happens if I explicitly specify -j16, or any number of jobs greater than 2. I would expect it not to launch jobs for input blocks that don't exist, and a variable number of jobs seems strange in any case.
