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From: smk@cbnews.cb.att.com (Stephen M. Kennedy)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Remote shell question
Message-ID: <1991Feb1.125425.14866@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 1 Feb 91 12:54:25 GMT
Sender: smk@cbnews.att.com (Stephen M. Kennedy)
Distribution: na
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 19

I want to start up a process in the background on a remote machine using
remsh (sysV) or rsh (bsd), e.g.,

	remsh/rsh remote-host 'sleep 30 > /dev/null 2>&1 &'

and I want the local remote shell command to return immediately.
This works if "remote-host" is a sysV machine, but if "remote-host"
is a SunOS 4.x (and perhaps this generalizes to bsd-like) machine,
the local remsh/rsh won't exit until the remote background command
terminates (or the remote rsh daemon is killed by root).  On the remote
side, ps'ing shows the sleep, a <defunct> process (the remote shell),
and the rshd (sleeping on "select" in the kernel).  What's going on
and is there a workaround?

Thanks,

Steve Kennedy
smk@cbosgd.att.com
att!cbosgd!smk