SERVICES(5)

NAME
services - 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 ``#'' indicates 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 functions interact with the DirectoryService(8) daemon, which reads the /etc/services file as well as searching other directory information services to determine service name, protocol, and port information.

FILES
/etc/services

SEE ALSO
getservent(3), getaddrinfo(3), DirectoryService(8)

HISTORY
The services file format appeared in 4.2BSD.