HOSTNAME(7) MachTen Reference Manual HOSTNAME(7)

NAME
hostname - 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 fash-
ion.

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 white-space separated
strings, the first of which is the hostname alias, and the second of
which is the complete 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 lithi-
um.CChem.CS.Berkeley.EDU and then as lithium.CChem.Berkeley.EDU. Lithi-
um.CChem.EDU will not be tried, as the there is only one component re-
maining from the local domain. The search path can be changed from the
default by a system-wide configuration file (see resolver(5)).

SEE ALSO
gethostbyname(3), resolver(5), mailaddr(7), named(8)

HISTORY
Hostname appeared in 4.2 BSD.

4.2 Berkeley Distribution December 30, 1993 1