Parallel Document Conversion ODT > PDF Libreoffice

Question

I am converting hundreds of ODT files to PDF files, and it takes a long time doing one after the other. I have a CPU with multiple cores. Is it possible to use bash or python to

Answer 1

Since the author already introduced Python as a valid answer:

import subprocess
import os, glob
from multiprocessing.dummy import Pool    # wrapper around the threading module

def worker(fname, dstdir=os.path.expanduser("~")):
    subprocess.call(["libreoffice", "--headless", "--convert-to", "pdf", fname],
                    cwd=dstdir)

pool = Pool()
pool.map(worker, glob.iglob(
        os.path.join(os.path.expanduser("~"), "*appsmergeme.odt")
    ))

Using a thread pool instead of a process pool by multiprocessing.dummy is sufficient because new processes for real parallelism are spawn by subprocess.call() anyway.

We can set the command as well as the current working directory cwd directly. No need to load a shell for each file for just doing that. Furthermore, os.path enables cross-platform interoperability.