4 ms·

A comment below explains exactly this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14699219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14699219

raldi 9y ago
No it doesn't. It explains what the three as a group do; what I'm asking is, what's the difference between these three? Why did we need three separate commands? When (in the pre-SSH days) would you use one versus the others?
- the_mitsuhiko 9y ago
  SSH also brings these separate commands and a few more. ssh, slogin, scp, sshd, and sftp.
  - raldi 9y ago
    Okay, but that's not the question I'm asking.
    - sigjuice 9y ago
      Each of these FreeBSD commands have man pages which your googling should have shown.
      - raldi 9y ago
        slogin is just a symlink to ssh, and sexec does not exist. So the s-commands' manpages tell me nothing about the difference between rsh, rlogin, and rexec, or why all three needed to be created.
        sigjuice 9y ago
        rsh, rlogin and rexec each have their own man pages, which you should be able to find on freebsd.org if google is being difficult.
        raldi 9y ago
        Right. They say that rsh can be used to get a login or run a command on a remote host. So why do the other two commands exist? In what situations would a person have wanted to use rlogin or rexec instead of rsh?
        sigjuice 9y ago
        Maybe rexec appeared first? And when rsh arrived later, they still kept rexec around? Perhaps they had a lot of shell scripts that contained "rexec" and didn't want to bother changing them to "rsh"? The actual reason is probably so mundane that maybe there is no accurate historical information on this topic.
        JdeBP 9y ago
        The irony here is that these manual pages are the very things being patched in the headlined message. Their exact locations in the source tree, and some of their contents, are right there in front of us.
        sigjuice 9y ago
        So read the older man pages? Why is this a problem? You can also easily read the man pages for a specific version of FreeBSD here https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi
- yrro 9y ago
  I'd assume rexec runs a command on a remote host non interactively; rsh runs an interactive shell on a remote host; and rlogin allows you to interact with login(1), again on a remote host. But I've not read the man pages as I'm on my phone.

raldi 9y ago

No it doesn't. It explains what the three as a group do; what I'm asking is, what's the difference between these three? Why did we need three separate commands? When (in the pre-SSH days) would you use one versus the others?

the_mitsuhiko 9y ago
SSH also brings these separate commands and a few more. ssh, slogin, scp, sshd, and sftp.
- raldi 9y ago
  Okay, but that's not the question I'm asking.
  - sigjuice 9y ago
    Each of these FreeBSD commands have man pages which your googling should have shown.
    - raldi 9y ago
      slogin is just a symlink to ssh, and sexec does not exist. So the s-commands' manpages tell me nothing about the difference between rsh, rlogin, and rexec, or why all three needed to be created.
      - sigjuice 9y ago
        rsh, rlogin and rexec each have their own man pages, which you should be able to find on freebsd.org if google is being difficult.
        raldi 9y ago
        Right. They say that rsh can be used to get a login or run a command on a remote host. So why do the other two commands exist? In what situations would a person have wanted to use rlogin or rexec instead of rsh?
        sigjuice 9y ago
        Maybe rexec appeared first? And when rsh arrived later, they still kept rexec around? Perhaps they had a lot of shell scripts that contained "rexec" and didn't want to bother changing them to "rsh"? The actual reason is probably so mundane that maybe there is no accurate historical information on this topic.
        JdeBP 9y ago
        The irony here is that these manual pages are the very things being patched in the headlined message. Their exact locations in the source tree, and some of their contents, are right there in front of us.
        sigjuice 9y ago
        So read the older man pages? Why is this a problem? You can also easily read the man pages for a specific version of FreeBSD here https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi
yrro 9y ago
I'd assume rexec runs a command on a remote host non interactively; rsh runs an interactive shell on a remote host; and rlogin allows you to interact with login(1), again on a remote host. But I've not read the man pages as I'm on my phone.