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