Sometimes, we might want to run a single program with many input files. For example, if we want to resize or crop a large number of photos to the same dimensions. The long way would be to open the first file in a photo editing program and manually resize it, then open the next one, do it again and so on. But, of course we are faster if we automate the task and, most important, use multiple processor cores for parallel processing. Certainly, there are specialized software tools that will do a batch resizing of images for you (most likely not in parallel, though). However, here I will demonstrate a structured and flexible way of applying a program to multiple files in parallel on the command line in a Linux environment using xargs.
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