Current version at: http://adric.net/hacks/upgrade-wp is seemingly feature complete and I need to test it on some WP sites :) so I guess we can move onto ... Mass Install WordPress

begin at...

on chistali-1 this worked almost perfectly:

#!/bin/bash
## upgrade wp - cd $DOMAIN; copy in new files, chown, click links

User=christal

for domain in `cat wp-sites` 
do

echo -n "$domain upgrading ..."
  cd /web/sites/$User/$domain
  cp -r /web/sites/sysadmin/wordpress/* .
  chown -R $User:www-data *
  curl http://www.$domain/wp-admin/ > /dev/null
  curl http://www.$domain/wp-admin/upgrade.php?step
1&backto
%2Fwp-admin%2F > /dev/null
  echo "$domain upgraded."

done

although curl was noisy and it seems not to have done the last site in the list..