UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Don Cragun is right, rsync would be the solution of first choice.

But still, if this is ruled out somehow for some reason we have yet to find out:

If you do not need to check for connectivity then all the better. But in your threads title and the first post you mentioned you have to use "expect" and this can conceivably only be to transmit passwords. If you can guarantee somehow your ssh-keys can always be readily exchanged (though i'd still check that before i'd base my procedures on that) you can simply use ssh to remote-execute any command(s) you want and that would probably be a cleaner solution than using expect to initiate a pseudo-interactive ssh-session.

If you need to remotely execute arbitrary commands then you might want to do it this way (sketch):

Code:

while read HOST USER ; do
     if ! ssh -nqo 'BatchMode=yes' "$USER"@"$HOST" some_command
          echo "Error: some_command returned $?"
     fi
done <<_EOF_
host1 user1
host2 user2
....
_EOF_

Again, I'd check if indeed the keys are exchanged by including the function i showed you and call it somewhere inside the loop as part of my errror checking, but that is up to you. You should be able to build your custom routine around the shown mechanism pretty easily.

I hope this helps.

bakunin