leahneukirchen/nq

Health v2 · maintenance only

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Adoption not part of the score

3127 stars · 69 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

nq is a set of tiny Unix command-line utilities for creating lightweight, ad-hoc job queues with no daemons, setup, or supervision. It enforces strict job ordering using flock(2) on timestamped log files, running entirely on the filesystem level.

Use cases

• queue shell commands to run one at a time without a daemon
• run make targets sequentially in the background
• create a simple download queue shared across terminals
• use as a glorified nohup for long-running jobs
• run benchmarks in several configurations sequentially
• check job status and wait for queued jobs to finish

When to choose

• you need a zero-setup, single-machine job queue
• you want strict FIFO execution order without a long-running scheduler
• you prefer simple POSIX-compliant Unix tools over heavyweight queue systems
• you need ad-hoc background job execution with per-job log files

When to avoid

• you need a distributed or multi-machine queue
• you require job priorities, retries, or complex scheduling
• you need a web UI or REST API for job management
• you have very high job volumes, since operations scale quadratically with lock files

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

cli scheduling workflow-automation developer-tools developer-tools bsd cli cross-platform job-queue posix flock no-daemon batch-processing unix-utilities command-line automation linux macos

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