in reply to Using perl to speed up a series of bash commands by transforming them into a single command that will run everything in parallel.

why 
my $parallel_running_command = parallelize_bash_commands([@commands]);

[download]
and not simplier and more efficient 
my $parallel_running_command = parallelize_bash_commands(\@commands);

[download]
Here is same but simplier, thus more maintenable version of parallelize_bash_commands function: 
sub parallelize_bash_commands {
   return join '', map { "( ( $_ ) & );" } @$_;
}

[download]
Why you checking for correctness of passed array ref into this sub? Let Perl do it.
Instead, you'll better check whether your passed commands contain "dangerous" characters like "(", "&", etc, which will break your sub in a much worse way!
  • Comment on Re: Using perl to speed up a series of bash commands by transforming them into a single command that will run everything in parallel.
  • Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Using perl to speed up a series of bash commands by transforming them into a single command that will run everything in parallel.
by tphyahoo (Vicar) on Jun 15, 2006 at 12:04 UTC
    A very good tip. I thought I was defending against, for example, passing in a hashref by mistake. But it appears that perl will throw an error in this case. Yay perl!

    However, I had to modify the sub you proposed to get it to work:

     return join '', map { "( ( $_ ) & );" } @{ $_[0] };

    Here's the code with a hashref, which gets thrown a nice error. 

    #!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Carp qw(confess);

my @commands = map {
  "echo $_; sleep 2";
} qw(a b c d e);

#does first, waits two seconds, does the second, waits two seconds, et
+c. (should take about ten seconds)
#for my $bash_command ( @commands  ) {
#  time_bash_command($bash_command);
#}

#does commands in parallel. (should take about two seconds)
my $parallel_running_command = parallelize_bash_commands([@commands]);
$parallel_running_command = parallelize_bash_commands( { a => 'sleep 2
+', b=> 'sleep 2', c => 'sleep 2'  } );


sub parallelize_bash_commands {

   return join '', map { "( ( $_ ) & );" } @{ $_[0] };
   #return join '', map { "( ( $_ ) & );" } @{ my $input = shift or di
+e "no input" }; # alternative -- also works, and checks if you forgot
+ to pass in a var.
   time_bash_command($parallel_running_command);
}

sub time_bash_command {
  my $command = shift or die "no command";
  $command = "time `$command`";
  print "$command\n";
  print `$command`;
}

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

In Section Meditations