There are several ways to perform some work on a remote host without ending the local session. With the commands
telnet and rlogin
you can establish a session on a remote host from within your local
session. Whereas commands such as
rsh, remsh and rexec
do not perform a login on a remote host but execute commands there for you.
Associated with the remote commands, eg: rlogin, rsh, remsh, rexec and rcp, is the special file known as a $HOME/.rhosts file . In this file you can place the names of users and their machines which may contact your machine and use your account without needing to give a password. The format of the $HOME/.rhosts file is as follows:
host1 userid
host2 userid
.
.
For security, make sure that you set the protections on this file so that only you can read it. Otherwise, an outside user can hack this file to gain access to your account. The protection should be rw for owner and no other access (mode 600). The command to set this is
chmod 600 .rhosts
In some (old) Unix documentation you may find an explanation of the use of the /etc/hosts.equiv file to achieve a similar result. For security reasons, you are strongly discouraged from using this mechanism.