by As part of our mail server testing we moved 10 people over to the new mail server and I used imapsync to get mail from the production mail server to the test mail server. I need to run this every 5 minutes and can run no more than 5 processes at a time. xargs allows this easily with the following command:
/usr/bin/xargs -n 2 -a /root/SyncAccts.txt -P5 /root/SyncAccts.sh
where -n 2 means take the first two arguments and pass them to the script SyncAccts.sh and -P5 means run no more than 5 processes at a time. The SyncAccts.txt file contains a list of user accounts and passwords which the SyncAccts.sh script uses with the imapsync command to sync their email.