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For use within scripts, I think it's a much easier matter to determine that parallel is on $PATH than to try to do feature detection on xargs. Granted, it's always possible that the parallel on $PATH might not be the one you're thinking of, but... Whatevs.

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> Granted, it's always possible that the parallel on $PATH might not be the one you're thinking of, but... Whatevs.

For exactly this reason, GNU Parallel has the option --minversion.

So in your script you put:

parallel --minversion 20140722 || exit

if the rest of your script depends on functionality only present from version 20140722.

If the parallel in the $PATH is not GNU Parallel it will fail (and thus exit). If it _is_ GNU Parallel it will fail if the version is < 20140722 and succeed otherwise.

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