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NAME

rsh — remote shell

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

rsh executes command on hostname.

Note: rsh has been deprecated in favor of ssh(1). Use of rsh is discouraged due to the inherent insecurity of host-based authentication.

rsh copies its standard input to the remote command, the standard output of the remote command to its standard output, and the standard error of the remote command to its standard error. Interrupt, quit and terminate signals are propagated to the remote command; rsh normally terminates when the remote command does.

The options are as follows:

-d

Enable socket debugging (using setsockopt(2)) on the TCP sockets used for communication with the remote host.

-l username

By default, the remote username is the same as the local username. The -l option allows the remote name to be specified.

-n

Redirect input from the special device /dev/null (see the BUGS section of this manual page).

If no command is specified, you will be logged in on the remote host using ssh(1).

If rsh is not invoked with the standard program name (“rsh”), it uses this name as its hostname argument.

Shell meta-characters which are not quoted are interpreted on local machine, while quoted meta-characters are interpreted on the remote machine. For example, the command

appends the remote file remotefile to the local file localfile, while

appends remotefile to other_remotefile.

FILES

/etc/hosts

 

SEE ALSO

ssh(1), rcmd(3)

HISTORY

The rsh command appeared in 4.2BSD.

BUGS

If you are using csh(1) and put a rsh in the background without redirecting its input away from the terminal, it will block even if no reads are posted by the remote command. If no input is desired you should redirect the input of rsh to /dev/null using the -n option.

Stop signals stop the local rsh process only; this is arguably wrong, but currently hard to fix for reasons too complicated to explain here.