Running multiple jobs with xjobs

The xjobs utility allows you to schedule several processes to run simultaneously to make the most of your system's resources.

Xjobs takes a list of arguments from standard input and passes them to a utility, or takes a list of commands from a script, and then runs the jobs in parallel. If you have a multiprocessor machine, xjobs will automatically run one job per processor by default. For instance, on a dual-CPU machine, if you run ls -1 *gz | xjobs gunzip, xjobs will gunzip two files at a time by default. If you run the same command on a quad-CPU machine, it will gunzip four files at a time by default, until it runs out of files to process.