services(5) BSD File Formats Manual services(5)

NAME

 services -- service name data base

DESCRIPTION

 The services file contains information regarding the known services
 available in the DARPA Internet. For each service a single line should
 be present with the following information:
 official service name
 port number
 protocol name
 aliases
 Items are separated by any number of blanks and/or tab characters. The
 port number and protocol name are considered a single item; a ``/'' is
 used to separate the port and protocol (e.g. ``512/tcp''). A ``#'' indi-
 cates the beginning of a comment; subsequent characters up to the end of
 the line are not interpreted by the routines which search the file.
 Service names may contain any printable character other than a field
 delimiter, newline, or comment character.

INTERACTION WITH DIRECTORY SERVICES

 Processes generally find service records using one of the getservent(3) 
 family of functions, or using getaddrinfo(3) . On Mac OS X, these func-
 tions interact with the DirectoryService(8)  daemon, which reads the
 /etc/services file as well as searching other directory information ser-
 vices to determine service name, protocol, and port information.

FILES

 /etc/services

SEE ALSO

 getservent(3) , getaddrinfo(3) , DirectoryService(8) 

HISTORY

 The services file format appeared in 4.2BSD.
4.2 Berkeley Distribution June 5, 1993 4.2 Berkeley Distribution