Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted
provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
duplicated in all such forms and that any documentation,
advertising materials, and other materials related to such
distribution and use acknowledge that the software was developed
by the University of California, Berkeley. The name of the
University may not be used to endorse or promote products derived
from this software without specific prior written permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

@(#)hosts.5 6.4 (Berkeley) 02/14/89

C 5 hosts - host name data base 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:

10 official host name

.ns

10 Internet address

.ns

10 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.

When using the name server named (8), this file provides a backup when the name server is not running. For the name server, it is suggested that only a few addresses be included in this file. These include address for the local interfaces that ifconfig (8C) needs at boot time and a few machines on the local network.

This file may be created from the official host data base maintained at the Network Information Control Center (NIC), though local changes may be required to bring it up to date regarding unofficial aliases and/or unknown hosts. As the data base maintained at NIC is incomplete, use of the name server is recommend for sites on the DARPA Internet.

Network addresses are specified in the conventional ``.'' notation using the inet_addr() routine from the Internet address manipulation library, inet (3N). Host names may contain any printable character other than a field delimiter, newline, or comment character.

/etc/hosts gethostbyname(3N), ifconfig(8C), named(8)

Name Server Operations Guide for BIND