line lengths in /etc/hosts

[Erik Nørgaard]

On 27 Mar 2013, at 09:57, perryh at pluto.rain.com (Perry Hutchison) wrote:

> Is there a limit on line length in FreeBSD's /etc/hosts?
> 
> I'm not finding any mention of such a limit in hosts(5), but
> characters beyond the first 660 or so seem to be ignored.
> 
> To answer the inevitable followup "why would anyone need such
> a long line in /etc/hosts":
> 
> With this line in /etc/nsswitch.conf
> 
>  hosts: files dns
> 
> I can easily suppress access to unwanted web sites by adding
> names to the localhost line in /etc/hosts, like this:
> 
>  127.0.0.1    localhost localhost.my.domain bad1.com bad2.com ...
> 
> My version of that line has gotten rather long :)

AFAIK you can have multiple lines. 

BR