Jessica

PLEASE CITE THE USE OF THIS PROGRAM IN YOUR ACADEMIC PAPER IT COSTS YOU NOTHING BUT BENEFITS US GREATLY

PLEASE TELL US YOU WILL CITE IF YOU DON'T CITE WE WILL STEAL YOUR COMPUTER

yeah I've done this a few times a few different ways, ranging from parallel to xargs to... forking background jobs and communicating with the parent via FIFO (used bash coprocesses for this but you can do it other ways too if you want to be slightly more POSIX-ey)

I like xargs better for trivial batch processing cases. It does a lot less than parallel and is already installed on everything and you don't have to sign over your thesis/firstborn/cat to GNU in order to use it. Things like sort and find et al. already have a mode that outputs null record separators, which xargs can parse, so you can even be whitespace-safe with it trivially easy.

The bash native cases were all instances of adapting an existing script to parallelize a bottleneck in a way that doesn't lend itself to an external process manager like then other two - eg. when the thing is a bash script function, or needs to feed back into the parent script in a way that isn't trivial. Every single one of these cases was cursed and I would never recommend it (but if you're curious, the parallel package usually ships with sem which allows you to use semaphores within your own scripts from a command line interface in case you want to do some really messed up stuff)

what're the space savings like with HEIF in your use? i've been running mine through oxipng nightly but that only tends to net around 30% space savings

(i also don't use the focus options in game option, which murders any sort of png compression, but that's less a space thing more i never think to |3)