Question

I have this large C++ project that I need to build on a platform that does not have a parallel make (like make -j on Linux). The server has 6 CPU’s and I want to do a parallel build manually.

I can generate a task list like this for about 300 object files. I use the Makefile for the dependency checks and incremental build:

make -f Makefile obj1.o

make -f Makefile obj2.o

make -f Makefile obj3.o …

How would I execute these tasks in parallel with no more then 6 tasks running at a time using Ksh and Perl? (Java or Python are not available 🙁 )

Answer 1

In Perl the you should look at Parallel::ForkManager. You could do something like this:

my @make_obj = qw(   obj1.o   obj2.o   obj3.o   ... );  my $fm = $pm = new Parallel::ForkManager(6); foreach my $obj (@make_obj) {   $fm->start and next;   system('make -f Makefile $make_obj');   $fm->finish(); }