HOSTNAME(7)					       BSD Miscellaneous Information 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
     subdomain 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 func-
     tion is generally performed by the library routine gethostbyname(3).)  Hostnames 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 white-space sepa-
     rated 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 lithium.CChem.CS.Berkeley.EDU and then as lithium.CChem.Berke-
     ley.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 resolver(5)).

SEE ALSO

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

HISTORY

     Hostname appeared in 4.2BSD.

BSD
								 December 30, 1993							       BSD