Life of a Sysadmin

The occassional trials and tribulations of a jack of all tr ades sysadmin in a startup in Silicon Valley

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June 2007

multixterm, or An entertaining and useful X app

I believe every unix shop has a locally written script that will run a specified script on a collection of hosts. I've certainly written that script before. Sometimes however I can't write a script that encapsulates my needs. For these needs, I can usually use multixterm.

As the name implies, multixterm runs multiple xterms. The neat part, is that it provides a way to provide the same input to all of those xterms at the same time.

Running the command; multixterm -xc "ssh %n" foo bar baz (where foo, bar, and baz are hostnames), will open three xterm terms. Each window will have already run the command "ssh hostname" (with one hostname per xterm). You will also have a small input window where you can type, and that text appears in all of the spawned xterms. Or, if you have an exception in a particular window, you can go type in that one alone.