Format of /etc/hosts file

[John F. Haugh II]

[ food for the line eater ]
[ repeat after me, i'll never talk bad about berkeley again ... ]

I am looking for the definitive documentation on the /etc/hosts file.
We have an EXCELAN EXOS board and the software which came with it
doesn't have gethostbyname, or so it seems, so I've had to write my
own and I thought it would be nice to know EXACTLY how ugly the hosts
file could be.  A BNF grammar would be fantastic, something less
well defined will suffice.

And if you are in the same boat, I've written (a possibly flawed)
gethostent() in case You Too(tm) have this problem.

And no, I don't have a set of FM's to R ;-)

- John.
-- 
 The Beach Bum                                 Big "D" Home for Wayward Hackers
 UUCP: ...!killer!rpp386!jfh                          jfh at rpp386.uucp :SMAILERS

 "You are in a twisty little maze of UUCP connections, all alike" -- fortune