Running processes in parallel
Running processes in parallel |
|
You can start up several processes at once by separating the commands
with ampersand (&) characters. For example, this
command line:
% prune&weed&water&
would run the three commands prune, weed,
and water, all at the same time.
Warning! Since all processes on a machine compete for resources on an equal basis, it is really anti-social to start up a lot of compute-intensive processes on the same machine. It is actually faster if you run them one at a time in sequence. You can do this by putting parentheses around a sequence of processes and using an ampersand after the closing parenthesis, like this:
% (prune;weed;water)&
This would run the prune job first, then the
weed process, then the water command, but
they would all be running in the background, and you would
get another Unix prompt right away.