Environment variable HOSTALIASES

[Mike O'Connor]

Dear comp.unix.questions:
 
On many flavors of BSD 4.3, I can set an environment variable called
HOSTALIASES to point to a file.  Example (under csh):
 
setenv HOSTALIASES somefile
 
If somefile contains hosts listed in the following way...
 
sim20 wuarchive.wustl.edu
uunet uunet.uu.net
dr ticsys.tamu.edu
mole mole.ai.mit.edu
 
...then I can abbreviate the full name of the host (the right part) with
the abbreviation (the left part).  Examples:
 
ftp sim20 will expand to:          ftp wuarchive.wustl.edu
mail user at uunet will expand to:    mail user at uunet.uu.net
telnet dr 2000 will expand to:     telnet ticsys.tamu.edu 2000
finger @mole will expand to:       finger @mole.ai.mit.edu
 
Two questions:
 
1.  I wish to implement this on an IBM PC RT running BSD 4.3.  How do I
go about doing this?  The procedure above doesn't seem to work on this
version of BSD 4.3.  (It works on HP300s BSD 4.3 and VAX Ultrix 4.0, as
far as I can verify.)
 
2.  I'd love to RTFM on the subject, but I have no idea of where to
start.  Where are the relevant subjects I should "man"?

 






--
Mike O'Connor
Internet:  mjo at mole.ai.mit.edu
UUCP: ...!uunet!mole.ai.mit.edu!mjo
Fidonet:  Mike O  1:2200/134.0