Although I answered the question that was asked, I always do as methyl suggests for any remote commands beyond a simple "uptime" or "date".

I do sometimes type in loops or quick function definitions at the command line locally as I showed in my example. So I stay up to speed on ksh syntax as well. Real example: I was on a broken system and cat and ls didn't work, nor did most commands. So I do a quick:

Code:

function mycat { while read l ; do echo "$l" ; done < $1 ; }
function myls { while [ $# -ne 0 ] ; do echo "$1" ; shift; done ;}

and I can look around with commands like "myls /etc/*" and "mycat somefile". It's very handy being able to pull stuff like that out of my hat when I need to.