osx man page for hosts

HOSTS(5)						      BSD File Formats Manual							  HOSTS(5)

NAME
     hosts -- host name data base

DESCRIPTION
     The hosts file contains information regarding the known hosts on the network.  For each host a single line should be present with the follow-
     ing information:

	   Internet address
	   Official host name
	   Aliases

     Items are separated by any number of blanks and/or tab characters.  A ``#'' indicates the beginning of a comment; characters up to the end of
     the line are not interpreted by routines which search the file.

     Network addresses may either be specified for IP version 4 or version 6.  IP version 4 addresses are specified in the conventional dotted
     address notation.	IP version 6 addresses are specified using the colon-separated notation described in RFC1924.

     Host names may contain any printable character other than a field delimiter, newline, or comment character.

     The hosts file is read by mDNSResponder(8) and used to supply results for calls to getaddrinfo(3), getnameinfo(3), etc. in addition to
     results obtained from multicast and unicast DNS.

FILES
     /etc/hosts

SEE ALSO
     gethostent(3), getipnodebyname(3), getaddrinfo(3), getnameinfo(3)

     RFC1924: A Compact Representation of IPv6 Addresses.

HISTORY
     The hosts file format appeared in 4.2BSD.

4.2 Berkeley Distribution					 December 11, 1993					 4.2 Berkeley Distribution