Shell Loop Interaction with SSH

If you have a bash script with a while loop that reads from stdin and uses ssh inside that loop, the ssh command will drain all remaining data from stdin1. This means that only the first line of data will be processed.

I encountered this issue yesterday2. This website explains why the behavior occurs and how to avoid it.

A flawed method to run commands on multiple systems entails a shell while loop over hostnames, and a Secure Shell SSH connection to each system. However, the default standard input handling of ssh drains the remaining hosts from the while loop

from Shell Loop Interaction with SSH.

1. This is not only true for ssh but for any command in the loop that reads from stdin by default [↩]
2. I won’t go into details here, since it is for a very specialized purpose. I will say that it involved jot, ssh, an aging Solaris based network appliance, and some new fangly XML/Web 2.0 [↩]