You cannot call a shell function from outside the shell where it was defined. A shell function is a concept inside the shell. The parallel command itself has no way to access it. Calling export -f doit in bash exports the function via the environment so that it is picked up by child processes. But … Read more
You are probably looking for –colsep. generate_file_pairs | parallel –colsep ‘ ‘ ./prog {1} {2} Read man parallel for more. And watch the intro video if you have not already done so http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpaiGYxkSuQ
As I was about to complete writing this question, I ran parallel –version to report the version, only to find: WARNING: YOU ARE USING –tollef. IF THINGS ARE ACTING WEIRD USE –gnu. It is not clear to me why that flag is set by default. Needless to say, using –gnu worked! Thought I would post … Read more