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cssh - Concurrent SSH
=====================

This is cssh, Concurrent SSH client.

Why cssh?
=========

I've used pssh and shmux, but I've been annoyed with poor customization of those programs, like inflexible IPs/hostnames specification or simultaneous spawning threads for all the hosts (pssh), which is a problem with many hosts, or having to download/upload files with a separate command.1

I wrote cssh.py to resolve such problems. You get:

- a fixed (configurable) length queue of active SSH threads

- specifying IPs/hostnames in 3 ways: on the commandline, in a specified file (-f), or "ipset" in a configuration file (-i ipset); all 3 ways can be combined together in a single command

- configurable username, password and SSH port per host (only in ipsets, though)

- simultaneous download and upload of files/dirs (using built-in SCP implementation), again with configurable queue length

- ability to upload and execute script with one switch (-s)

- many other useful options, like additional saving cmd outputs in a separate file for each machine (-d output_dir), or suppressing printing out hosts for which given command produced no output (-b)

Installation
============

See INSTALL file.



Example usage
=============

Help:

# cssh.py -h

Create default .cssh.rc file:

# cssh.py -0 > ~/.cssh.rc

See ~/.cssh.rc, and add named ipsets, like:

linuxes = 192.168.1.1, 192.168.1.5 root secretpass 2222, --ip 192.168.1.23 --port 2345

Use ipset for command:

# cssh.py -c "ps|wc" -i linuxes

Save output to a "outdir" directory:

# cssh.py -c "ps|wc" -a outdir -i linuxes

Download /tmp/result file from "linuxes"

# cssh.py -d /tmp/result -a result_dir -i linuxes

Upload a file to /usr/local/bin on "linuxes":

# cssh.py -y somefile -g /usr/local/bin -i linuxes