UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

In an effort to adapt to best security practices, it has been suggested that a number of scripts that are going to be distributed to multiple machines across an internal network use be modified to replace instances of rsh and rcp with openSSH ssh and scp. Since there are so many references to rsh and rcp in the existing scripts, it was proposed that rather than edit all of the script files, we just alias rsh with ssh and rcp with scp, then disable use of rsh and rcp. This doesn't really sit right with me but I need more than that to justify why the actual files should be edited. Being sort of new to Unix I can't really come up with a valid reason why this solution isn't a good idea. Any thoughts? Am I just being naive and this solution is just as good as manually going in and editing the scripts? Thanks for your help.

By using rsh in the scripts a potential vulnerability remains if you forget to alias/symlink and/or disable the use of rsh and rcp on a system.

Anyway, manually editing the scripts, might require less effort than is perhaps thought:

Just copy the script onto a Linux box into for example directory mydir and issue:

Code:

cd mydir
sed -i.bak 's/rcp/scp/g;s/rsh/ssh/g' *

if you are satisfied with the results:

Code:

rm *.bak