Ubuntu Manpage: services - Internet network services list

NAME

       services - Internet network services list

DESCRIPTION

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

FILES

       /etc/services
              The Internet network services list

       <netdb.h>
              Definition of _PATH_SERVICES

COLOPHON

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NAME

DESCRIPTION

FILES

SEE ALSO

COLOPHON