As Ed pointed out to me on 10/15/1999, you can type
       man socks_clients
to get help text on how to use the normal, socksified clients,
rfinger, rftp, rtelnet, & rwhois.  The nuggets of information there
regarding the environment variables, holds true for other socksified
programs, e.g. Ed's version of ssh.  For example,

SOCKS_SERVER, if defined, specifies the name or IP address of the
              SOCKS proxy server host to use, overriding the
              default server compiled into the programs.

SOCKS_NS, if defined, specify the IP address of the domain
          nameserver that should be used for name resolution,
          overriding both the definition of symbol SOCKS_DEFAULT_NS
          and the file /etc/resolv.conf.