>> The remote host's $TERM variable is in fact xterm. When I connect to >> the screen session the $TERM variable is 'screen'. > > Are you running screen locally or remotely? Remotely. My work machine is a laptop, which is not powered on all the time. Hence I use a remote box as a jumping-off point, and run my screen sessions there. > Or you could write a script, scp it to the hosts you want to run it on > (testing first, natch), and exec it: > > for host in <hostlist>; do scp myscript $host:.; done > > [fiddle around with tests or verification as necessary] > > for host in <hostlist>; do echo "** $host **"; ssh $host ./myscript; done Yes, I do this quite a bit. But there are often times when I have to do interactive work, running different commands on various hosts. > As I mentioned earlier, dsh (distributed ssh) is a very powerful tool > for running multiple remote commands. Puppet, cfengine, and other tools > may also be useful. Yes, thank you for the pointers. I'm familiar with both puppet and cfengine. The GNU screen sessions are mainly used during the build process, before a server has puppet or cfengine up and running.