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I scp and ssh a zillion times a day, and because of our corporate policy I can't get rid of /etc/issue or /etc/motd on the destination machines. So whereas I just want to see the results of my scp or ssh, all I ever end up seeing is thousands of copies of the motd. .hushlogin doesn't seem to be honored. Any other ideas on how to get rid of the message display? Is there some sshd config setting I don't know about (though I probably couldn't change that either)? Is there some curiously sunos/solaris specific way to achieve the goal?

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Do you know if this is displayed using 'Banner /etc/issue' in sshd_config? This text may be displayed using different components of of the login process: 'Banner' is displayed by SSHD, /etc/motd is displayed after you login, /etc/issue is displayed by ...something else. If we know this, then we might be able to help you better. –  Stefan Lasiewski Jun 10 '10 at 17:38
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If touch .hushlogin doesn't work on the remote host, try ssh -q which seems to work for me in some cases.

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yea this works for ssh, but not for scp, but hey, better than nothing, thanks. –  Stu Jun 14 '10 at 2:39
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/etc/issue is displayed before any authentication, so it will always be displayed, interactive or sftp, with hushlogin or without.

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correct, /etc/issue is displayed before authentication, however, ssh -q will suppress this, at least it does for me in Solaris 10 and Solaris 8. –  TD1 Jun 29 '10 at 21:27
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