Bash is redirecting output from command only after script has finished - bash

Question

Context
Got a daft script that checks a process is running on a group of hosts, like a watchdog, as I say it's a daft script so bear in mind it isn't 'perfect' by scripting standards
Problem
I've ran bash -x and can see that the script finishes its first check without actually redirecting the output of the command to the file which is very frustrating, it means each host is actually being evaluated to the last hosts output
Code
#!/bin/bash
FILE='OUTPUT'
for host in $(cat /etc/hosts | grep webserver.[2][1-2][0-2][0-9] | awk {' print $2 ' })
do ssh -n -f $host -i <sshkey> 'ps ax | grep myprocess | wc -l' > $FILE 2> /dev/null
cat $FILE
if grep '1' $FILE ; then
echo "Process is NOT running on $host"
cat $FILE
else
cat $FILE
echo "ALL OK on $host"
fi
cat $FILE
done
Script traceback
++ cat /etc/hosts
++ awk '{ print $2 }'
++ grep 'webserver.[2][1-2][0-2][0-9]'
+ for host in '$(cat /etc/hosts | grep webserver.[2][1-2][0-2][0-9] | awk {'\'' print $2 '\''})'
+ ssh -n -f webserver.2100 -i <omitted> 'ps ax | grep myprocess | wc -l'
+ cat OUTPUT
+ grep 1 OUTPUT
+ cat OUTPUT
+ echo 'ALL OK on webserver.2100'
ALL OK on webserver.2100
+ cat OUTPUT
+ printf 'webserver.2100 checked \n'
webserver.2100 checked
+ for host in '$(cat /etc/hosts | grep webserver.[2][1-2][0-2][0-9] | awk {'\'' print $2 '\''})'
+ ssh -n -f webserver.2101 -i <omitted> 'ps ax | grep myprocess | wc -l'
+ cat OUTPUT
2
+ grep 1 OUTPUT
+ cat OUTPUT
2
+ echo 'ALL OK on webserver.2101'
ALL OK on webserver.2101
+ cat OUTPUT
2
+ printf 'webserver.2101 checked \n'
webserver.2101 checked
Issue
As you can see, it's registering nothing for the first host, then after it is done, it's piping the data into the file, then the second host is being evaluated for the previous hosts data...
I suspect its to do with redirection, but in my eyes this should work, it doesn't so it's frustrating.

Answer 1

I think you're assuming that ps ax | grep myprocess will always return at least one line (the grep process). I'm not sure that's true. I'd rewrite that like this:
awk '/webserver.[2][1-2][0-2][0-9]/ {print $2}' /etc/hosts | while IFS= read -r host; do
output=$( ssh -n -f "$host" -i "$sshkey" 'ps ax | grep "[m]yprocess"' )
if [[ -z "$output" ]]; then
echo "Process is NOT running on $host"
else
echo "ALL OK on $host"
fi
done
This trick ps ax | grep "[m]yprocess" effectively removes the grep process from the ps output:
the string "myprocess" matches the regular expression "[m]yprocess" (that's the running "myprocess" process), but
the string "[m]yprocess" does not match the regular expression "[m]yprocess" (that's the running "grep" process)