On 7/26/24 at 1:11 PM, Alan wrote: > What is the right way to get GNU parallel running on a Mac?
Installing GNU Parallel from the release tarball at https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel should theoretically work fine, requiring only built-in software that comes with macOS. I am not too sure about _very_ recent macOS releases, though, as things _do_ get removed from the base OS as time goes on[0]. Also not sure if newer macOS includes a C compiler without installing Xcode, running 'xcode-select --install', or downloading the command-line tools from their developer site[1], which requires an account. Such is life when you stray from the beaten path in macOS. Both the GNU Parallel tutorial[2] and the README included in the tarball should have instructions for performing the install. This will go into /usr/local/bin, which appears to be in the default search path for macOS. I tried myself on an older-but-supported macOS release with $PATH set to /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin only (excluding any software I had installed myself or via MacPorts) and it worked fine. What _you_ have at present is 'parallel' from moreutils[3], which provides several _other_ useful utilities, among them 'pee', 'vidir', and 'sponge'. So getting the two 'parallel's confused is a very relatable situation. vDebian-based Linux distributions have a workaround, and that is to move 'parallel' from moreutils to 'parallel_moreutils' so that you can have both packages installed. However, based on [4] from the Homebrew web site, I don't know if there's such an option with Homebrew. If you don't have any luck with installation from source, as described above, and you're sure you don't need any of the utilities provided by 'moreutils', you could uninstall 'moreutils', and then 'brew install parallel' to get GNU Parallel. I'm not sure Ole considers Homebrew a "supported" platform, though, so if you have problems with the version in Homebrew, it's probably best to report problems through that project's particular support channels. Hope that helps. --Kevin [0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-notes/macos-catalina-10_15-release-notes#Scripting-Language-Runtimes [1]: https://developer.apple.com/xcode/resources [2]: https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/parallel_tutorial.html#prerequisites [3]: https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils [4]: https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/parallel
