es-remote problem; how to fix?

[rittle@comm.mot.com (Loren James Rittle)]

Hello,

I have access to 40+ workstations.  I want to build a parallel make
utility with GNU make and es.

I have defined the following functions:

fn res m c {if {~ $#c 0} {c=es -i}; rsh $m `{{vars;vars -f;vars -s} | sed 's,$,;,'}';cd '`pwd';prompt=''u=''^$USER^''@''^`{hostname | sed ''s,\([^.]*\).*,\1,''}^''; '' '''';'$^c}
fn pick-remote {l=`{wc -l ~/.rhosts}; d=`{date +%H%M%S}; a=$d $pid + $l(1) % 1 + p; o=`{dc <<< $^a}; tail +$o ~/.rhosts | head -1}
fn es-remote {res `pick-remote $*}

CC=es-remote /usr/local/bin/gcc

es-remote seems to work fine if I have no 's in the command.

But, as you can see, the following doesn't work:

u=rittle@supra; echo 'a=b'
a=b
u=rittle@supra; es-remote echo 'a=b'
es panic: bad conversion character in printfmt: %i

Can anyone explain what I'm missing and a possible fix?

Thanks,
Loren