Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!TERMINUS.UMD.EDU!dzoey
From: dzoey@TERMINUS.UMD.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: rsh equivalent
Message-ID: <8803032115.AA04988@terminus.UMD.EDU>
Date: 3 Mar 88 21:15:27 GMT
References: <2028@ho95e.ATT.COM>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 23

> Less important but harder to fix,  rsh is non-interactive; 

There's nothing in the rsh/rexec protocol that says it's not
interactive.  It is possible to write your own rsh/rexec program that
accepts and issues character i/o.  After all, rsh/rexec protocols just
describe how to establish data streams and do some trivial
authentication.  If you invoke an interactive process with your rsh
command you can do interactive processing (with some exceptions). 
Certain programs (like more) will not work correctly since there is no
terminal attatched.  Rsh/rexec are not virtual terminal protocols
and the BSD server does not establish a pty for the process.  
Programs will work if they only look at environment variables for
terminal information.

I've only tried this in a BSD (or derivitive) environment.  I don't know
how other OS's handle rsh/rexec requests.


                                Joe Herman
                                PC/IP project.
                                The University of Maryland
                            

dzoey@terminus.umd.edu