I have a command that takes parameters like "'a {} b {}'" (that's one shell word), where I want each {} replaced with the (same, single) item from stdin. Right now, I can only seem to give one parameter to each job:
$ seq 4 | parallel echo "'a {} b {}'" a 1 b 1 a 2 b 2 a 3 b 3 a 4 b 4
I'd like to be able to give as many parameters as will fit on a command line, so I can fork less jobs:
$ seq 4 | parallel -??? echo "'a {} b {}'" a 1 b 1 a 2 b 2 a 3 b 3 a 4 b 4
I looked into -X, -L, -n, -m, --xargs, and variations, but none of them seem to do what I want. Is there a way to do this with parallel?