Here are a couple of tools that I use. Both are very quickly put
together to solve a job in an easy and portable way. 

1) 'teston'. This allows one to quickly run a configure/make on a remote
machine. It copies via scp the files to a remote computer and then
executes them there, sending the results back to the local machine. 

This was developed for testing purposes

Usage: teston [options] remote_host package

It does *NOT* work on the local host, for reasons I can't understand.
The 'configure' script goes all wrong. I've no idea why, and the
'autoconf' and 'automake' mailing lists could not answer it either. If
you know whey, let me know. 

2) 'runremote' is a script that calls 'teston' (see above) to run
an application on a large number of machines in parallel. It must makes
lots of calls to 'teston'. 

Usage: runremote package

The program 'runremote' is expected to be hacked for each system. 
It is designed for testing here, but the hostnames are hardcoded, so it
will certainly need hacking if you want to use it. 


3) 'mymd5sum'. 
md5 is a well known, good checksum generator. Not all systems have
it, those that do call it different names (md5, md5sum) and output the
data in sligtly different formats. The program 'mymd5sum' computes
and MD5 checksum, reporting only on the checksum, not the filename
as most other implementations do.

4) Program 'filelength' reports the length of a file in bytes. I was not
sure if ls -l was portable, so this one is.

Dr. David Kirkby, 20th Aprol 2003