Hi guys,
I have 6 machines I'm trying to kick a bunch of commands off on. I need to pass a few variables to them and I only seem to be able to use 1.

script is..
#!/bin/bash
now=`date +%Y%m%d.%H%M%S`
for i in `cat all.txt`; do
ssh $i "mkdir -p $mountdir/test1/bigfiles/big_$i_$now"
done
I've also tried setting $i to another variable and using it, but it gets dropped and only $now is used
+ ssh lintest31601.pre.domain.com 'mkdir -p /mount/testing/test1/bigfiles/big_20110425.135937'

If I remove $now then $i is expanded fine.
+ ssh lintest31601.pre.domain.com 'mkdir -p /mount/testing/test1/bigfiles/big_lintest31601.pre.domain.com'

I'm not sure what could be causing this. I've tried both no quotes and double quotes but to no avail. Anyone have any thoughts?

Just a guess: it looks like you missed the braces to embed the variable names:
here the shell tries to substitute a variable called i_ (i underscore, since the underscore is a valid character for variable names), whereas
will work with the non-null $i value followed by a literal underscore and by the value of the variable now.

all set...

stupid quotes.

workingdir="$i"_"$now"


I had been setting $i_$now which the script was reading it as variable1=$i_ and variable2=$now and since the first variable before the "_" was always wrong, therefore null, and appeared dropped.

Syntax will drive me mad someday...

It's probably good scripting practice to always encase variable names in {}. I think today is going to teach me to start doing that