nq mit Homebrew, apk, apt, dnf, MacPorts, Nix installieren

Projektlinks

• Homepage
• Upstream-Dokumentation
• Paketmanager-Seite

Befehle und Aliase

• nq
• nqtail
• nqterm

Projektgeschichte

The README positions nq as a set of small utilities for lightweight job queues with no setup, maintenance, supervision, or long-running daemon. It depends on POSIX.1-2008 behavior plus flock(2), and the README records testing across Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X, and SmartOS.

The design is deliberately Unixy: jobs are represented by timestamp/PID log files, ordering is enforced with file locks, output is redirected to the job file, and environment variable NQDIR can move queues out of the current directory. The v1.0 tag points to a 2024-07-03 commit that renamed fq to nqtail and tq to nqterm because another fq project created packaging conflicts.

Adoptionsgeschichte

nq has more mindshare than its tiny code size suggests. The GitHub metadata consulted for this batch reported about 3.1k stars and 70 forks, and the input record shows packages across Alpine, Homebrew, Debian, Fedora/DNF, MacPorts, Nix, and Ubuntu.

Homebrew analytics reported only 52 installs over its 365-day window, so Homebrew is not the best measure of its audience. Its broader adoption signal is distro packaging and repeated mentions in command-line communities as a no-daemon alternative to heavier queue systems or ad hoc nohup chains.

Wie es verwendet wird

Practical use is simple: prefix a long-running command with nq, get a job id, and let it run in the background in queue order. Users inspect output with nqtail, wait with nq -w, test pending jobs with nq -t, kill by PID-like filename conventions, and set NQDIR when they want named queues.

Package nerds like nq because it solves a real shell annoyance without a service, config file, database, or scheduler. It is especially handy for serializing downloads, builds, benchmark runs, or one-off maintenance commands on machines where installing and supervising a queue daemon would be silly.

Warum Paket-Nerds sich dafür interessieren

nq is significant as a minimal Unix tool: it uses filesystem locks and process semantics instead of owning an infrastructure layer. That makes it attractive to users who prefer composable command-line primitives.

Zeitleiste

• 2015-07-31: GitHub repository leahneukirchen/nq created.
• 2015-08-28: v0.1 tag commit date.
• 2024-07-03: v1.0 tag commit renames fq to nqtail and tq to nqterm to avoid packaging conflicts.

Related projects

• task-spooler
• nohup
• flock
• tmux
• screen

Quellen

• https://api.github.com/repos/leahneukirchen/nq
• https://api.github.com/repos/leahneukirchen/nq/commits/2556453d844f9d5224abd843ea2de3df1e8a0d42
• https://api.github.com/repos/leahneukirchen/nq/commits/2bb551efd8b3e50d715482a8f3b89f88bae74397
• https://api.github.com/repos/leahneukirchen/nq/tags?per_page=10
• https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula/nq.json
• https://github.com/leahneukirchen/nq