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When using the rlogin or rsh commands, most people use the syntax:
rlogin host
or
rsh host [command]
In the past, a few system users made use of a little known feature of BSD based UNIX systems which was a directory called /usr/hosts where a selection of symbolic links reside. These files allowed people to use shortcut commands if they had added /usr/hosts to their path; effectively, dropping the rlogin or rsh from the command lines. The host name itself on the command line was then used to reference the remote host directly.
This idea worked fine for small networks. However now that the ECN has grown to several hundred hosts, this directory has become cumbersome to maintain and has created problems due to the conflicts between host names and other command names (e.g. matlab).
In order to reduce problems and free up critical disk space, we will no longer attempt to keep links for every network host in this directory. As of February 1st, this directory will contain only links for the principal server and time sharing hosts. This will satisfy most current uses of this directory. If people have hosts they commonly reference in this manner, they can either add them to their shell's alias list or to their private bin directory.
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