Re: threads, forks and SSH

[mr_mischief]

I'm not saying not to do this in Perl. However, there are many tools already for this sort of task.

Are you building a distributed application? Something like RabbitMQ or some other information queue or job queue may help. There's OpenMPI and the Parallel::MPI or Parallel::MPI::Simple library wrapping it if you need that sort of parallel interaction.

Are you doing configuration of the systems? Is this a one-off thing or will it grow to manage more things? Have you looked at GNU Parallel? How about multissh? CFEngine may work for you, too. On the really comprehensive end there are Saltstack, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet. They'll manage almost every aspect of every system across a whole server farm and report status back about everything they've done. Rex is a configuration management system that supports Windows, Linux, the BSDs, Solaris, and OS X and is written in Perl even. I'll admit I don't have any experience with Rex myself, but if you're wanting something in Perl you don't have to write from scratch it may be worth a long, hard look.

There's a comparison page for open source configuration management systems on Wikipedia.