hosts(5) BSD File Formats Manual hosts(5)

NAME

 hosts -- host name data base

DESCRIPTION

 The hosts file contains information regarding the known hosts on the net-
 work. 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 delim-
 iter, 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.
4.2 Berkeley Distribution December 11, 1993 4.2 Berkeley Distribution