1) The script is in use among several machines that my co-worker and I administer on a private network, so, we're not too concerned about that angle. That being said, there's no reason why this script's use needs to be root-only. It's not like normal users cant rsh. You're free to edit to your hearts desire, of course.

2) Pulling the output into a single array allows us a simple way to dump the contents into a separate report, which is what the foreach inside of execRoutine() was used for, originally...something I omitted from the code you're looking at.

3) For our uses, we preferred the results to come back sequentially--The decision not to fork off the rsh calls was an intentional one. Besides, with the limited number of boxes we're adressing, we don't gain much in speed by forking anyway.