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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 be bound
to only 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. 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. For
example, 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 4.12 of the Linux man-pages project. A
description of the project, information about reporting bugs, and the
latest version of this page, can be found at
https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
Linux 2010-05-22 SERVICES(5)
Pages that refer to this page: getaddrinfo(3), getnameinfo(3), getservent(3), getservent_r(3), nscd(8), rpc.rquotad(8), rsyslogd(8)