But how does a local host know that all remote hosts have completed making their local copies of the file? Sleep until the file exists on the other host and then make sure no other host has a lock on the file? That's the kind of stuff that I don't want to code myself, especially because I need guarantees that race conditions won't arise. It's very possible that I'm overthinking all this; I was kind of just hoping someone would say something like "oh yeah, just use distributed_agreement.pm" from cpan or something like that.