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