ETHERS(5)

NAME
ethers - Ethernet host name data base

DESCRIPTION
The ethers file maps Ethernet MAC addresses to host names. Lines consist of an address and a host name, separated by any number of blanks and/or tab characters. A ``#'' character indicates the beginning of a comment; characters up to the end of the line are not interpreted by routines which search the file.

Ethernet MAC addresses are expressed as six hexadecimal numbers separated by colons, e.g. "08:00:20:00:5a:bc". The functions described in ethers(3) and ether_aton(3) can read and produce this format.

FILES
/etc/ethers
    The ethers file resides in /etc.

SEE ALSO
ethers(3)

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

HISTORY
The ethers file format was adopted from SunOS and appeared in NetBSD 1.0.