The services file contains information regarding the known services available in the 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.

Access to the NIS services.byname map can be enabled by adding a single ‘‘+’’ on a line by itself in the /etc/services file. This causes the contents of the NIS services map to be inserted at the location where the ‘‘+’’ appears.

• /etc/services The services file resides in /etc.

getservent(3)

The services file format appeared in

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