Date: Mon, 09 Feb 2026 13:38:31 +0000 From: bugzilla-noreply@freebsd.org To: bugs@FreeBSD.org Subject: [Bug 293060] _PATH_RLOGIN is outdated Message-ID: <bug-293060-227@https.bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/>
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https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=293060 Bug ID: 293060 Summary: _PATH_RLOGIN is outdated Product: Base System Version: CURRENT Hardware: Any OS: Any Status: New Severity: Affects Some People Priority: --- Component: misc Assignee: bugs@FreeBSD.org Reporter: cross@gajendra.net By way of context, for those that may not remember, the Berkeley "r" commands (rlogin/rsh/rcp) were early networking utilities that allowed users to login into, execute commands on, and copy files to and from, remote machines. They used per-user and per-host configuration files to determine whether access was permitted or not, and relied on the client being able to access privileged ("reserved") TCP ports to prevent spoofing (see `rcmd(3)`). As such, they were not particularly secure, and once SSH became available and ubiquitous, quickly fell out of favor. They were removed from the FreeBSD base distribution many years ago. However, for connecting to old systems on closed networks, they can be handy (at least, the clients, if not the servers), and so there is a package for them in ports. Unfortunately, that package relies on symbols from <paths.h> (`_PATH_RLOGIN`, specifically) that is still refers to their old pathnames from the 4.4BSD days. The `rsh` ("remote shell") program, for example, is intended for executing commands on a remote system, but invoked with no command specified, it will instead exec "rlogin" locally, allowing one to login to a remote host by typing, "rsh host". But this fails since the package attempts to `argv[0] = "rlogin"; execv(_PATH_RLOGIN, argv);`. This is easy enough to work around in the port (https://github.com/jlehen/bsdrcmds/pull/2), but that symbol, along with _PATH_RSH and _PATH_RCP, should probably be removed from the base system. I would argue that the `rcmd` et al library functions should probably also be removed, or at least moved out of libc and into a compatibility library (possibly provided by the port) if not. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.home | help
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