NAME
hosts —
host name data base
DESCRIPTION
The hosts file contains information
regarding the known hosts on the network. For each host a single line should
be present with the following information:
Internet address Official host name Aliases
Items are separated by any number of blanks and/or tab characters. A ``#'' indicates the beginning of a comment; characters up to the end of the line are not interpreted by routines which search the file.
Network addresses may either be specified for IP version 4 or version 6. IP version 4 addresses are specified in the conventional dotted address notation. IP version 6 addresses are specified using the colon-separated notation described in RFC1924.
Host names may contain any printable character other than a field delimiter, newline, or comment character.
The hosts file is read by
mDNSResponder(8) and used to supply results for calls to
getaddrinfo(3),
getnameinfo(3), etc. in addition to results obtained from multicast
and unicast DNS.
FILES
- /etc/hosts
SEE ALSO
gethostent(3), getipnodebyname(3), getaddrinfo(3), getnameinfo(3)
RFC1924: A Compact Representation of IPv6 Addresses.
HISTORY
The hosts file format appeared in
4.2BSD.