June 19, 2007 SERVICES 5

### NAME

services - service name data base

### DESCRIPTION

The services file contains information regarding the known services available in the DARPA Internet. For each service a single line should be present with the following information:

      official service name
      port number
      protocol name
      aliases

Items are separated by any number of blanks and/or tab characters. The port number and protocol name are considered a single item; a slash (``/'') is used to separate the port and protocol (e.g. ``512/tcp''). A hash (``#'') indicates the beginning of a comment; subsequent characters up to the end of the line are not interpreted by the routines which search the file.

Service names may contain any printable character other than a field delimiter, newline, or comment character.

The database in /var/db/services.db needs to be updated with services_mkdb(8) after changes to the services file have been applied.

### FILES

```/etc/services`
  The services file resides in ```/etc`.

### SEE ALSO

getservent(3) services_mkdb(8)

### HISTORY

The services file format appeared in 4.2BSD.

### BUGS

A name server should be used instead of a static file.