rsh (remote shell) -- undocumented(?) feature(?)

[Bill Phillips]

I just discovered an apparently undocumented feature of the remote
shell rsh (not to be confused with the restricted shell of the same
name).  rsh imposes a umask of 022 on all programs run through it.
This caused us much consternation and confusion, and led to many
man-days of fruitless and unnecessary debugging.  As far as I have
been able to determine after considerable research, this is entirely
undocumented.

We are running SGI IRIX 3.2 and 3.3 on a number of Personal Irises.

Questions:

    - has anyone ever run into this before (I don't recall having
    seen discussions of it, but I could have missed it -- if
    anyone has articles or pointers, I'd like to see them)?

    - might this be under the control of some configuration file?
    I have definitely determined that neither ~/.profile nor
    /etc/profile was responsible.

    - if this is a known "feature", is there some flag for rsh,
    or some other way of turning it off (other than prepending
    "umask 0;" to every command line sent through rsh)?

We'll be turning off the umask from within the programs run by rsh
now, but that only applies to our own software, of course.

Thanks,
bill
-- 
William F Phillips,  Sr. Engr.,  Development Systems Development Group,
    Xyvision Design Systems  +  101 Edgewater Drive  +  Wakefield, MA, USA
        uunet!contex!bill                     (formerly wfp at well & wfp at dasys1)