Most powerful examples of Unix commands or scripts every programmer should know

Question

There are many things that all programmers should know, but I am particularly interested in the Unix/Linux commands that we should all know. For accomplishing tasks that we may

Answer 1

To run in parallel several processes without overloading too much the machine (in a multiprocessor architecture):

NP=`cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l`
#your loop here
    if [ `jobs | wc -l` -gt $NP ];
    then
         wait
    fi
    launch_your_task_in_background&
#finish your loop here