Shell Programming and Scripting

Okay I have this script file that runs from cron and most the time it works just find. Except every so often one of the three ssh commands I have in it just doesn't know it's done and that of course causes the whole thing to hang!

The ssh command has executed. I can tell this because the command is as follows

ssh username@hostname "ls /somedirectory" >somedir.file

and a new somedir.file has been created on the machine running the cron script.

Also, when this happens I can use the "kill sshprocessid" command and the cron script will continue, fat dumb and happy!

I figure there is a race condition of some kind going on for the end of command signal and once in awhile it gets missed but.... I just don't know where else to look....

Any ideas???

Well, I see that people have read my question but have not heard any ideas from anyone

It leaves me wondering if I did not write the question well enough so people can understand me or if it's just a problem no one else has had to deal with or .... ?????

Just incase anyone cares, I've posted this question is several different places and got no responses so to get over this issue in my script I'm doing the following:

ssh username@hostname "command to process" >fileforoutput &

This (the "&") makes the command run in the back ground and control comes back to the script (even if the ssh command hangs).

next I sleep 60 seconds, to give the ssh command time to run and then I look for the ssh process and kill it if it's still there.

Not pretty but I think it will work.

I'ld still like to avoid the problem so if anyone out there has a better idea post it