Gzip with all cores

I have a set of servers filled each with a bunch of files that can be gzipped. The servers all have different numbers of cores. How can I write a bash script to launch a gzip for each core and make sure the gzips are not zipping the same file?

If you are on Linux, you can use GNU's xargs to launch as many processes as you have cores.

CORES=$(grep -c '^processor' /proc/cpuinfo)
find /source -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 -P $CORES gzip -9

• find -print0 / xargs -0 protects you from whitespace in filenames
• xargs -n 1 means one gzip process per file
• xargs -P specifies the number of jobs
• gzip -9 means maximum compression