This document is a Mac OS X manual page. Manual pages are a command-line technology for providing documentation. You can view these manual pages locally using the man(1) command. These manual pages come from many different sources, and thus, have a variety of writing styles.

For more information about the manual page format, see the manual page for manpages(5).

SERVICES(5)                 BSD File Formats Manual                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.

4.2 Berkeley Distribution        June 5, 1993        4.2 Berkeley Distribution