NAME
hosts - The static table lookup for hostnames
SYNOPSIS
/etc/hosts
DESCRIPTION
This manual page describes the format of the /etc/hosts file. This
file is a simple text file that associates IP addresses with hostnames,
one line per IP address. For each host a single line should be present
with the following information:
IP_address canonical_hostname [aliases...]
Fields of the entry are separated by any number of blanks and/or tab
characters. Text from a "#" character until the end of the line is a
comment, and is ignored. Host names may contain only alphanumeric
characters, minus signs ("-"), and periods ("."). They must begin with
an alphabetic character and end with an alphanumeric character.
Optional aliases provide for name changes, alternate spellings, shorter
hostnames, or generic hostnames (for example, localhost).
The Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) Server implements the Internet
name server for Unix systems. It augments or replaces the /etc/hosts
file or hostname lookup, and frees a host from relying on /etc/hosts
being up to date and complete.
In modern systems, even though the host table has been superseded by
DNS, it is still widely used for:
bootstrapping
Most systems have a small host table containing the name and
address information for important hosts on the local network.
This is useful when DNS is not running, for example during
system bootup.
NIS Sites that use NIS use the host table as input to the NIS host
database. Even though NIS can be used with DNS, most NIS sites
still use the host table with an entry for all local hosts as a
backup.
isolated nodes
Very small sites that are isolated from the network use the host
table instead of DNS. If the local information rarely changes,
and the network is not connected to the Internet, DNS offers
little advantage.
FILES
/etc/hosts
NOTES
Modifications to this file normally take effect immediately, except in
cases where the file is cached by applications.
Historical Notes
RFC 952 gave the original format for the host table, though it has
since changed.
Before the advent of DNS, the host table was the only way of resolving
hostnames on the fledgling Internet. Indeed, this file could be
created from the official host data base maintained at the Network
Information Control Center (NIC), though local changes were often
required to bring it up to date regarding unofficial aliases and/or
unknown hosts. The NIC no longer maintains the hosts.txt files, though
looking around at the time of writing (circa 2000), there are
historical hosts.txt files on the WWW. I just found three, from 92,
94, and 95.
EXAMPLE
127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.1.10 foo.mydomain.org foo
192.168.1.13 bar.mydomain.org bar
146.82.138.7 master.debian.org master
209.237.226.90 www.opensource.org
SEE ALSO
hostname(1), resolver(3), resolver(5), hostname(7), named(8), Internet
RFC 952
COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.24 of the Linux man-pages project. A
description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.