Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Inter-machine networking on System V
Message-ID: <966@auspex.UUCP>
Date: 7 Feb 89 20:11:33 GMT
References: <446@thirdi.UUCP> <11181@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> <9598@smoke.BRL.MIL> <7645@chinet.chi.il.us> <9605@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 26

>Does anyone know for sure which of the following common utilities can
>pass 8-bit data fully transparently?
>	rsh	rexec	remsh

"remsh" is, I think, just the name given to "rsh" on some System V
implementations to avoid collisions with the restricted shell.  "rsh",
at least on SunOS 4.0, handled 8-bit data quite happily with the command

	rsh <machine> "cat >file" <file-with-8-bit-characters

i.e., "file" ended up containing the same 8-bit characters, and with the
command

	rsh <machine> "cat file-with-8-bit-characters" >file

I didn't find any 177, 200, 0[xX]7[Ff], or 0[xX]80 in the source to the
"rsh" or "rexec" daemons, or to the source to the client library
routines in 4.3BSD, so I'm not at all surprised to find that it worked
OK.  (The SunOS 4.0 versions are not heavily modified from the 4.3BSD
versions, at least not in parts other than the startup part; I know nobody
explicitly 8-bit-cleaned them.)

Note that they do invoke a shell to run the command, though - as I
remember, it's the login shell of the remote user - so if the shell in
question can't handle 8-bit characters, you may have trouble with e.g.
command-line arguments.