Question: why not use shell builtins? about parallelshell

[keithamus]

Hey @philer thanks for the issue.

We had a discussion about this in #5. Hopefully this will provide some good context for you.

Abridged is:

• & creates a background process, which only exits if you kill it or it ends. parallelshell will autokill processes if one of the others dies.
• Your example (command1 & command2 & command3) will wait in the terminal until command3 ends only. parallelshell will wait until all 3 end.
• In your example, if command1/command2 exit with non-zero exit code, then this will not effect the outcome of your shell (i.e. they can fail and npm/bash/whatever will ignore it). parallelshell will not ignore it, and will exit with the first non-zero exit code.
• In your example, pressing Ctrl+C will exit command3 but not 1/2. parallelshell will exit all 3
• parallelshell outputs all jobs stdout/err to its stdout/err. background jobs do that... kind of coincidentally (read: unreliably)
• You could use wait to alleviate some of these issues, but wait does not solve them all, and is not available in Windows (as far as I know)

If you don't need the above, feel free to use & or wait. If you need all of the above, use parallelshell 😄

[philer]

I see. Should have searched the issues first.
Thanks for your answer, I can see now how your tool could be helpful. :)