spreading work across all cores

credit where credit is due: I adapted this from: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=92290

I've made the framework generic, so all you need to do is replace the "work" portion to do whatever particular work on a file.

#!/bin/bash -f

# the number of cores you have on your system
cores=`grep -c ^processor /proc/cpuinfo`

process() {
  for file; do

      # begin replace ----------------------------
      #whatever you want done on all files.  example:
      fileout=$(echo "$file" | sed s'/.wav//')
      lame -V 2 "$file" "$fileout".mp3; 
      # end replace ----------------------------

  done
}
export -f process

# by default works on all files in or under the current directory which match the provided argument
find . -name $*  -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 -P $cores bash -c 'process "$@"' --

Put the above in a file, say, "forall". Then run:

chmod 755 forall

Then you can run:

forall *.wav

...and forall will run lame on all the *.wav files under the current directory.