Pausing in GNU parallel and waiting for character

Question

I would like the timing pause to be replaced with the equivalent of a getchar() in a GNU parallel execution:

parallel -j2 --halt 2 ::: 'sleep 5m; return 1' './runMe'

However the following does not work (it finishes the execution of the first job immediately):

parallel -j2 --halt 2 ::: 'read -n1 kbd; return 1' '/runMe'

Is there another way than just waiting? NB: ./runMe contains an infinite loop.

Answer 1

GNU Parallel can run interactively using -p.

parallel -p echo ::: 1 2 3

You will have to answer y every time, but maybe that is good enough.

Also be aware that any output will be delayed. When running 3 jobs in parallel, the output of job 1 will be printed after starting job 3.