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From: mjo@irie.ais.org (Mike O'Connor)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Environment variable HOSTALIASES
Summary: How?  Where?
Keywords: HOSTALIASES
Message-ID: <1991Feb28.231939.28562@engin.umich.edu>
Date: 28 Feb 91 23:19:39 GMT
Sender: news@engin.umich.edu (CAEN Netnews)
Organization: Artificial Intelligence Society
Lines: 36

Dear comp.unix.questions:
 
On many flavors of BSD 4.3, I can set an environment variable called
HOSTALIASES to point to a file.  Example (under csh):
 
setenv HOSTALIASES somefile
 
If somefile contains hosts listed in the following way...
 
sim20 wuarchive.wustl.edu
uunet uunet.uu.net
dr ticsys.tamu.edu
mole mole.ai.mit.edu
 
...then I can abbreviate the full name of the host (the right part) with
the abbreviation (the left part).  Examples:
 
ftp sim20 will expand to:          ftp wuarchive.wustl.edu
mail user@uunet will expand to:    mail user@uunet.uu.net
telnet dr 2000 will expand to:     telnet ticsys.tamu.edu 2000
finger @mole will expand to:       finger @mole.ai.mit.edu
 
Two questions:
 
1.  I wish to implement this on an IBM PC RT running BSD 4.3.  How do I
go about doing this?  The procedure above doesn't seem to work on this
version of BSD 4.3.  (It works on HP300s BSD 4.3 and VAX Ultrix 4.0, as
far as I can verify.)
 
2.  I'd love to RTFM on the subject, but I have no idea of where to
start.  Where are the relevant subjects I should "man"?
 

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