True, but for a large number of hosts, going manually through prompts doesn't scale anymore. Sometimes you just want to check whether all hosts have the same co

True, but for a large number of hosts, going manually through prompts doesn't scale anymore. Sometimes you just want to check whether all hosts have the same configuration file, or something like that. That's where GNU Parallel can save your gluteus maximus: cat hosts.txt | parallel --quote --timeout=10 ssh {} 'echo {} $(md5sum ~/.config/file)' The above command would take a list of hostnames from the hosts.txt file, connect to each one, hash the config file and print out hostnames and hashes in one line per host.