====== Use GNU parallel (to compress large files) ======

[[http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/|GNU parallel]] is a great utility to take advantage of multiple cores.  You can download the latest source from the bottom of this [[http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parallel/|page]].  

The installation is pretty straightforward also.  Unzip, ''./configure'', ''make'', and ''sudo make install''.  This is it with GNU software, it just works.

To use this tool, for example zipping a list of files

<code>
find `pwd` -name "*.sdf" | sort | parallel -j4 --will-cite bzip2 -9
</code>

The ''-j4'' limits the bzip2 process to 4 processes and the ''--will-cite'' removes the extremely annoying citation message (something about donating 10,000Eur).