Concurrent Shell Command Queues
Summary
The article presents a Bash based approach to running shell commands in parallel while constraining concurrency. It introduces a queue mechanism implemented with mkfifo and xargs, exposing functions queue_start, queue_submit, and queue_wait for semi resilient, portable parallelism in Bash and Zsh. The piece includes practical examples such as making multiple web requests with a fixed level of parallelism, deterministic ordering, and behavior when submitting queues from subshells, and discusses how this compares to using xargs -P or GNU parallel, along with known issues and tradeoffs for lightweight batch processing.