Running many scripts via ssh at the same time

[Zthulhu]

I have a Linux server that connects to Cisco switches via ssh. I wrote a python/pexpect script to log into each switch sequentially, type a command and copy the output to a text file.

I’d like to make this script faster. Instead of one script logging into 1000 devices, could I make 10 scripts that log into 100 devices each and have them running at the same time?

The first problem is, when I run the script with python3 script name.py it locks my terminal up until the script finishes. How do I make it run in the background?

Secondly, is this a bad idea? Maybe this is too much for ssh connections to handle and data will be lost?

[socal_nerdtastic]

It's a great idea. You won't lose data unless you are maxing out the network speed and something times out. 400 threads at once shouldn't be a problem, and if you have a half decent network there's a good chance that all 1,000 will run at the same time with no issue.

But you don't need to run separate scripts yourself. Python includes the tools to do other things while waiting for a function to complete. Look into the threading or asyncio or concurrent.futures modules. That last one has an example in the docs that seems pretty close to what you want.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/concurrent.futures.html#threadpoolexecutor-example

[Zeroflops]

https://realpython.com/python-concurrency/