ETHERS(5)

NAME
ethers - Ethernet host name database

DESCRIPTION
The ethers file maps Ethernet addresses to host names. Lines consist of an address and a host name, 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.

Ethernet addresses are expressed as six hexadecimal numbers separated by colons. The functions described in ethers(3) can read and produce this format.

The ethers file has support for YP functionality, which is enabled by specifying a ‘+’ alone on a line.

FILES
/etc/ethers

SEE ALSO
ethers(3), diskless(8)

HISTORY
The ethers file format was adopted from SunOS and appeared in NetBSD 0.9b.

BUGS
A name server should be used instead of a static file.

Lines in /etc/ethers are limited to BUFSIZ characters (currently 1024). Longer lines will be ignored.