Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

The shell remains one of the most powerful tools on a computer system — yet a large number of users are unaware of how much one can accomplish with it. Using a combination of simple commands, we will see how to solve complex problems in day to day computer usage.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition will take you through useful real-world recipes designed to make your daily life easy when working with the shell. The book shows the reader how to effectively use the shell to accomplish complex tasks with ease.The book discusses basics of using the shell, general commands and proceeds to show the reader how to use them to perform complex tasks with ease.Starting with the basics of the shell, we will learn simple commands with their usages allowing us to perform operations on files of different kind. The book then proceeds to explain text processing, web interaction and concludes with backups, monitoring and other sysadmin tasks.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition serves as an excellent guide to solving day to day problems using the shell and few powerful commands together to create solutions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Making commands quicker by running parallel processes


Computing power has increased a lot over the last couple of years. However, this is not just because of having processors with higher clock cycles; the thing that makes modern processors faster is multiple cores. What this means to the user is in a single hardware processor there are multiple logical processors.

However, the multiple cores are useless unless the software makes use of them. For example, if you have a program that does huge calculations, it will only run on one of the cores, the others will sit idle. The software has to be aware and take advantage of the multiple cores if we want it to be faster.

In this recipe we will see how we can make our commands run faster.

How to do it...

Let us take an example of the md5sum command that we discussed in the previous recipes. This command is CPU-intensive as it has to perform the calculation. Now, if we have more than one file that we want to generate a checksum of, we can run multiple...