This isn't a complete answer, but a possible approach: I'd use a named pipe on the destination host. Here's a little experiment to demonstrate.
[user@dhost temp]$ mkfifo pipe [user@dhost temp]$ while true ; do ` < pipe` ; done
Now, in another xterm:
[user@dhost temp]$ echo date > pipe [user@dhost temp]$ echo 'ls -l' > pipe
You can 'echo' commands to the pipe in multiple windows; the while loop will only read and execute one command at a time off the pipe. You can see where this is going - now your multiple servers just ssh those echo commands to the destination host and the corresponding commands are executed.
I'll leave it to you to make it suitably robust if you go this way; you'll need to add some error handling, possibly signal handling, etc. but that's just standard shell scripting.
Best,
--- Les Bell
Thank you all very much! This is the exact approach I am trying out now as this is such a small scale quick need, once I roll out Torque or something for my earlier problem, I could apply it here as well.
The command I execute is always the same shell script with a unique parameter passed into it, I'll look into tuning this up so it accepts the single word passed in via ssh, then executes the bash script with this as $1.
Thanks everyone! jlc