SERVICES(5) BSD File Formats Manual SERVICES(5)NAMEservices — 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 ALSOgetservent(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
