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by killerbat00 3269 days ago
A comment below explains exactly this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14699219
1 comments

No it doesn't. It explains what the three as a group do; what I'm asking is, what's the difference between these three? Why did we need three separate commands? When (in the pre-SSH days) would you use one versus the others?
I'd assume rexec runs a command on a remote host non interactively; rsh runs an interactive shell on a remote host; and rlogin allows you to interact with login(1), again on a remote host. But I've not read the man pages as I'm on my phone.
SSH also brings these separate commands and a few more. ssh, slogin, scp, sshd, and sftp.
Okay, but that's not the question I'm asking.
Each of these FreeBSD commands have man pages which your googling should have shown.
slogin is just a symlink to ssh, and sexec does not exist. So the s-commands' manpages tell me nothing about the difference between rsh, rlogin, and rexec, or why all three needed to be created.
rsh, rlogin and rexec each have their own man pages, which you should be able to find on freebsd.org if google is being difficult.