rsync to multiple remote servers

Question

I have a file I want to sent to multiple separate servers. Is it possible to name multiple destinations?

rsync foo.png server1:foo.png server2:foo.png

This gives me a "Unexpected remote arg:server1:foo.png

Answer 1

Turns out there is a program that permits this, just not the original rsync program. It's called pssh (parallel ssh I suppose)

One of the features:

"-- Parallel rsync (parallel-rsync, upstream calls it prsync), efficiently copies files to multiple hosts in parallel"
- http://www.ubuntugeek.com/execute-commands-simultaneously-on-multiple-servers-using-psshcluster-sshmultixterm.html

Answer 2

No, there is no way in rsync to specify multiple destinations. You'll need to invoke the command multiple times. If you have many targets, you might want to consider using a network filesystem instead--it might be a better fit for your problem.

Answer 3

Albeit you're invoking the command multiple times through file input, this can be done by specifying the desired destinations in one desired file:

while read in; do rsync -av /Path/of/Source/Synced.file "$in":/Path/of/Destination/Synced.file; done < destinations.txt

Please excuse my test as I only had two systems available at the time, but I'm most certain this will work for multiple systems as desired. It's not the most elegant method I suppose, but it's definitely one way of automating. And please, feel free to correct me if this doesn't work as I don't have the resources available to test beyond two systems at this time of post.