line lengths in /etc/hosts

[Erich Dollansky]

Hi,

On Wed, 27 Mar 2013 10:09:29 +0100
Erik Nørgaard <norgaard at locolomo.org> wrote:

> 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. 
> 
yes, I have hundreds or even thousands of lines and never ran into any
problems.

Erich