commplex is a utility to connect to run multiple commands behind a common front end. Consider the following scenario. You want to login to 20 different boxes and run a bunch of commands on all the boxes. At this point it is important that all the commands be the same. The ability to selectively chose which boxes to talk to will be added later. Assume you want to ssh to 20 boxes and edit the mount points on all 20 boxes and then mount some file system. This utility will let you talk to all 20 boxes at the same time, by typing only once. You can download the stable version of commplex here. The following example is from the README file.

In this example the program spawns three bash shells. The output from the first bash shell is displayed to the user. 

------------EXAMPLE BEGIN-----------------
Script started on Sun Dec 21 22:11:51 2003
/home/aravind/coding/c/projects/commplex $cat wins
bash
bash
bash
/home/aravind/coding/c/projects/commplex $
/home/aravind/coding/c/projects/commplex $ps
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
17996 pts/10   00:00:00 ksh
17998 pts/10   00:00:00 ps
/home/aravind/coding/c/projects/commplex $
/home/aravind/coding/c/projects/commplex $./commplex wins
Please select the number of the command (between 1 and 3),
 whose output you want displayed on screen:1
File has 3 commands.
Spawned bash
Spawned bash
Spawned bash
High FD: 5
~/coding/c/projects/commplex $pstree 17996
ksh---commplex-+-bash---pstree
               `-bash
               `-bash
~/coding/c/projects/commplex $exit
exit
/home/aravind/coding/c/projects/commplex $
Script done on Sun Dec 21 22:12:41 2003
------------EXAMPLE END-------------------

Anything you type in the main window will be sent to all the processes (the three bash shells in this case) listed in the command file (wins in this case). The output from one of the processes (shell 1 in this case) will be displayed on screen.

Ideally we would not need programs like this, the "multipurpose swiss army" GNU screen program would eventually add this functionality to their program and this wouldn't be necessary anymore. I do intend to add GUI support to this, so the user would be able to see a separate window for each command, focus and target specific windows, etc. I plan on using GNOME's VTE for this, I just haven't gotten around to it. Please check the todo list for future plans.