So what's the difference between xargs and parallel? I thought the point of parallel was that it was xargs with the addition of running things in parallel. But if xargs can do that already, is there any reason to use one over the other?
In addition to the above, it's worth nothing that parallel also supports running the jobs on multiple remote systems via ssh, giving you an easy way to take advantage of a whole cluster.
For what it's worth, GNU Parallel seems to be fairly new; at work I have an ubuntu distro from this year and it's not in the package repo yet. xargs is POSIX so you can expect it everywhere, though no parallel option is specified (merely encouraged).
