Hi Ole, If I manually run ls -a -l from the command line I get the usual long directory listing showing all the chmod info, file owner, size, date, name for the files and directories (including the hidden files). If I run parallel -v -bash -c ls ::: "-l -a" I don't get that. I just get the regular ls output (albeit parallel reports it as one item per line).
I've tried running parallel -v -bash -c ls ::: "-l -a" on version 20120422 running on Mac OS X 10.6.8 (with bash 4.2.8(1)-release) and using version 20120322 on Ubuntu 10.04 (with bash 4.1.5(1)-release) and neither of them work as you intended. What version of parallel did you expect your example to work with? Thanks, Alastair. On 14 May 2012, at 12:49, Ole Tange wrote: > On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 5:48 PM, Alastair Andrew <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> If you call it with the -d flag it'll run parallel in --dry-run mode >> echo-ing its proposed runs allowing you to see the addition backslashes in >> the generated arguments. Using --nice inflates the number backslashes too. > > The problem you are experiencing can be summed up as: > > parallel -v ls ::: "-l -a" > > Your problem is that you want the arguments to be parsed by the shell > and not escaped. That is in contrast to this situation: > > parallel -v ls ::: "my file" > > where you do _not_ want the argument to be parsed by the shell, but > want it escaped so it is interpreted as a single argument. > > What you are hitting is therefore a design decision which makes sense > most of the time, but not all the time. > > So what to do? One solution is to give the command line to 'bash -c': > > parallel -v bash -c ls ::: "-l -a" > > by doing so you can have your cake and eat it, too, so commands like > this will be possible: > > parallel -v touch {1}\; bash -c ls {2} ::: "my file" ::: "-l -a" > > Here the first part is quoted and the second part unquoted (by bash > -c). It also does the right thing with --nice. > > > /Ole
