Without the context of why this was developed, I have to agree with easytiger's point of pointlessness. Perhaps it was just an exercise in curiosity and exploration of the language. If not, I would use pdsh instead http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdsh/ $ pdsh -b -w '10.0.0.1,...,10.0.0.n' 'cat /var/log/your_log | grep "your_pattern"'