system("rshto $wks myscript.prl >> $tmp_file");
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Within "myscript.prl" instead of just printing and capturing STDOUT to $tmp_file, open it instead and write to it. You will want to checkout flock which may help prevent the overwriting problem. Still, if you have hundreds of thousands of processes/machines all trying to write to the same file, you are creating a huge bottleneck. What about running the command on each machine as you appear to want to do, but write it to a local temporary accumulation file. Then either retrieve each one, or send them to a common queue (on a periodic basis) where a second process can collate them into this one behemoth file you desire? Just a thought.

-THRAK
www.polarlava.com

There is flock, which would lock the file. But, each process has to request what the flock status is and I'm not very conversant on how that works.

Now, what you're saying is that you're going to run this script on separate workstations. Why not just run it, store the logfile locally, then have another script which gathers together all the data?

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/me wants to be the brightest bulb in the chandelier!

Vote paco for President!

Something in the back of my mind is scratching me and telling me there might be problems with using flock over NFS (I assume you're using NFS if all these workstations are writing to the same file?)

Another potential approach? how about saving files as:

localtime().hostname.extension?

That way, you can sort the files date/time order simply by doing an ls -l.

Note - this would assume that all the machines are synchronized to the same clock.

Couldn't you utilize the users home directories for a location for the temp file, and then run one script to comb the homedirs and conglomerate them all into a master file?

-OzzyOsbourne