Subject: Re: bug#20768: RFC: Multithreaded grep

From: Zev Weiss <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2015 05:26:37 -0500

On Tue, Jun 09, 2015 at 11:00:34AM +0100, Aaron Crane wrote:
>Zev Weiss <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> At a high level: I've added a new flag, -M/--parallel[=N], that
>> enables multithreaded operation.
>
>Thanks, this looks really interesting.
>
>I'd like to suggest changing the code to use -j/--jobs as the name for
>the relevant option; that would match both GNU Make and GNU parallel.
>(GNU parallel also allows -P/--max-procs as an alias, but -P already
>has a meaning in GNU grep.)
>
>-- 
>Aaron Crane ** http://aaroncrane.co.uk/

Hmm -- I picked --parallel largely for consistency with the 
corresponding flag for coreutils' sort, which strikes me as a closer 
relative to grep than either make or parallel.  Also, the word "jobs" 
has (at least to me) a definite suggestion of multiple processes rather 
than threads.  sort doesn't have a matching short option though, so I 
went with -M to suggest "mulithreaded" (since, as you point out, -P is 
already in use).  Though I notice now that lower-case -p is still 
available; perhaps that might be better than -M.

Zev