Prompt expansion, multi-job for

[Andre Pang <andrep-ml@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hiya guys,

    I've got two completely separate questions about zsh.

    1) Let's say I'm in the /usr/local/src path at the moment.  Normally, if
you use the %~ prompt expansion, it will expand to /usr/local/src - no
surprises there.  What I'd like to do is trim each path element to one
character unless it's the last path element, in which case it should be
displayed to a maximum of, say, 15 characters.  eg, /usr/local/src should be
displayed as "/u/l/src", /usr/local/src/linux would be displayed as
"/u/l/s/linux", and /usr/local/src/linux-2.2.14+reiserfs+raid+ide might be
displayed as "/u/l/s/linux-2.2.14...".  Is this possible with the current
prompt expansion codes, or will I have to write up a function to do it, if
it's possible to do at all?

    2) Is there any way to emulate make's -jn option in the for command? 
This would be *really* useful for SMP systems.  Currently, doing something
like "for i in ***/***.wav; do l3enc $i; done" doesn't take advantage of
multiple CPUs (on a Linux system, at least); hacking the for command to
accept a 'make -j'-like parameter (eg: for -j2 i in *; do l3enc $i; done)
would allow us lucky ones who have SMP systems to do many things similar to
the above without going mad and writing silly Makefiles simply so we can
utilise make -j.  If someone's written a function to do this already (Bart?
;) it'd be *very* cool.

    Thanks,


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: Andre Pang <andrep@xxxxxxxxxxx> - Purruna Pty Ltd - ph# 0411.882299 :
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