HOSTNAME(7) BSD Reference Manual HOSTNAME(7)NAMEhostname - host name resolution description
DESCRIPTION
Hostnames are domains, where a domain is a hierarchical, dot-separated
list of subdomains; for example, the machine monet, in the Berkeley sub-
domain of the EDU subdomain of the Internet would be represented as
monet.Berkeley.EDU
(with no trailing dot).
Hostnames are often used with network client and server programs, which
must generally translate the name to an address for use. (This function
is generally performed by the library routine gethostbyname(3).) Host-
names are resolved by the Internet name resolver in the following
fashion.
If the name consists of a single component, i.e., contains no dot, and if
the environment variable HOSTALIASES is set to the name of a file, that
file is searched for any string matching the input hostname. The file
should consist of lines made up of two whitespace separated strings, the
first of which is the hostname alias, and the second of which is the com-
plete hostname to be substituted for that alias. If a case-insensitive
match is found between the hostname to be resolved and the first field of
a line in the file, the substituted name is looked up with no further
processing.
If the input name ends with a trailing dot, the trailing dot is removed,
and the remaining name is looked up with no further processing.
If the input name does not end with a trailing dot, it is looked up by
searching through a list of domains until a match is found. The default
search list includes first the local domain, then its parent domains with
at least 2 name components (longest first). For example, in the domain
CS.Berkeley.EDU, the name lithium.CChem will be checked first as
lithium.CChem.CS.Berkeley.EDU and then as lithium.CChem.Berkeley.EDU.
Lithium.CChem.EDU will not be tried, as there is only one component
remaining from the local domain. The search path can be changed from the
default by a system-wide configuration file (see resolv.conf(5)).
SEE ALSOgethostbyname(3), resolv.conf(5), mailaddr(7), named(8)HISTORY
A hostname manual page appeared in 4.2BSD.
MirOS BSD #10-current December 30, 1993 1
