OK, remsh propagates nothing because it does not have a terminal concept. rlogin does have a terminal concept (it is interactive) so (see man rlogin) TERM is propagated to the remote system. But that's all. This is identical to telnet which is also proagated to the remote machine.
However, that is not a good thing anymore. In old Unix days, terminal characteristics such as baud rate, parity, etc, needed to be propagated and each flavor of the rlogin or telnet daemon would use these to setup local behavior. Today, the underlying (and rather detailed) protocol handshake that you never see will handle this. But it leaves TERM defined at the remote system *prior* to running /etc/profile and .profile--this is not good. For instance, if you're on a Linux box and telnet/rlogin to HP-UX, /etc/profile will inherit TERM=linux, a bad thing because the terminfo library knows nothing about "linux" as a terminal (untic linux). And Windows may set something like TERM=ansi or whatever terminal emulator you are using on the PC.
So /etc/profile should be coded to NEVER use what it inherits for TERM. Instead, let ttytype probe your terminal automatically for the TERM variable. Get rid of the: if [ $TERM = something ] and replace all of that with:
exec $(ttytype -s)
Now your terminal setting on the remote side will be correct. ttytype will set TERM LINES and COLUMNS automatically. Run ttytype -s to see what it does.
Bill Hassell, sysadmin
