So I periodically stumble over some new shell nuance or tool that
makes my heart go pitter-pat.  I'm never sure if my new discovery is
old hat to everyone else, but I want to talk about it anyway, Just In
Case.

One of the multi-ssh variants, 'cssh' (available under clusterssh in
ubuntu) has a fascinating lagniappe:   If you

cssh root@{news,mail}-backend-{0,1,2,3,4}

in addition to the 10 shell windows, you'll get an additional "admin
console", which is diminuitive.  If you focus there, you're proxying
focus to -all the other shells-.  

Just typing in the root password once, instead of 10 times, is nice.
But if you ever have the semantic task similar to "This message passed
through our mail system, but I don't know which back-end", you can do
your first layer of grep on all of them simultaneously.

If you've ever done something 'here', and then pasted the command into
'there, there and there', this is a tool which would save some
brainspace.


- Allen S. Rout