Remote shell question

[Stephen M. Kennedy]

I want to start up a process in the background on a remote machine using
remsh (sysV) or rsh (bsd), e.g.,

	remsh/rsh remote-host 'sleep 30 > /dev/null 2>&1 &'

and I want the local remote shell command to return immediately.
This works if "remote-host" is a sysV machine, but if "remote-host"
is a SunOS 4.x (and perhaps this generalizes to bsd-like) machine,
the local remsh/rsh won't exit until the remote background command
terminates (or the remote rsh daemon is killed by root).  On the remote
side, ps'ing shows the sleep, a <defunct> process (the remote shell),
and the rshd (sleeping on "select" in the kernel).  What's going on
and is there a workaround?

Thanks,

Steve Kennedy
smk at cbosgd.att.com
att!cbosgd!smk