NAME | DESCRIPTION | FILES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON
SERVICES(5) Linux Programmer's Manual SERVICES(5)
services - Internet network services list
services is a plain ASCII file providing a mapping between human-friendly
textual names for internet services, and their underlying assigned port
numbers and protocol types. Every networking program should look into this
file to get the port number (and protocol) for its service. The C library
routines getservent(3), getservbyname(3), getservbyport(3), setservent(3), and
endservent(3) support querying this file from programs.
Port numbers are assigned by the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority),
and their current policy is to assign both TCP and UDP protocols when
assigning a port number. Therefore, most entries will have two entries, even
for TCP-only services.
Port numbers below 1024 (so-called "low numbered" ports) can only be bound to
by root (see bind(2), tcp(7), and udp(7)). This is so clients connecting to
low numbered ports can trust that the service running on the port is the
standard implementation, and not a rogue service run by a user of the machine.
Well-known port numbers specified by the IANA are normally located in this
root-only space.
The presence of an entry for a service in the services file does not
necessarily mean that the service is currently running on the machine. See
inetd.conf(5) for the configuration of Internet services offered. Note that
not all networking services are started by inetd(8), and so won't appear in
inetd.conf(5). In particular, news (NNTP) and mail (SMTP) servers are often
initialized from the system boot scripts.
The location of the services file is defined by _PATH_SERVICES in <netdb.h>.
This is usually set to /etc/services.
Each line describes one service, and is of the form:
service-name port/protocol [aliases ...]
where:
service-name
is the friendly name the service is known by and looked up under.
It is case sensitive. Often, the client program is named after the
service-name.
port is the port number (in decimal) to use for this service.
protocol is the type of protocol to be used. This field should match an
entry in the protocols(5) file. Typical values include tcp and udp.
aliases is an optional space or tab separated list of other names for this
service (but see the BUGS section below). Again, the names are case
sensitive.
Either spaces or tabs may be used to separate the fields.
Comments are started by the hash sign (#) and continue until the end of the
line. Blank lines are skipped.
The service-name should begin in the first column of the file, since leading
spaces are not stripped. service-names can be any printable characters
excluding space and tab. However, a conservative choice of characters should
be used to minimize compatibility problems. E.g., a-z, 0-9, and hyphen (-)
would seem a sensible choice.
Lines not matching this format should not be present in the file. (Currently,
they are silently skipped by getservent(3), getservbyname(3), and
getservbyport(3). However, this behavior should not be relied on.)
This file might be distributed over a network using a network-wide naming
service like Yellow Pages/NIS or BIND/Hesiod.
A sample services file might look like this:
netstat 15/tcp
qotd 17/tcp quote
msp 18/tcp # message send protocol
msp 18/udp # message send protocol
chargen 19/tcp ttytst source
chargen 19/udp ttytst source
ftp 21/tcp
# 22 - unassigned
telnet 23/tcp
/etc/services
The Internet network services list
<netdb.h>
Definition of _PATH_SERVICES
listen(2), endservent(3), getservbyname(3), getservbyport(3), getservent(3),
setservent(3), inetd.conf(5), protocols(5), inetd(8)
Assigned Numbers RFC, most recently RFC 1700, (AKA STD0002)
This page is part of release 3.23 of the Linux man-pages project. A
description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found
at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
Linux 2008-09-23 SERVICES(5)