Manual Pages  — PROTOCOLS

protocols – protocol name data base

DESCRIPTION FILES SEE ALSO HISTORY BUGS

The protocols file contains information regarding the assigned protocol numbers used by IPv4 and IPv6 to identify the next level protocol. For each protocol a single line should be present with the following information:

official protocol name
protocol number
aliases

Items are separated by any number of blanks and/or tab characters. A ``#'' indicates the beginning of a comment; characters up to the end of the line are not interpreted by routines which search the file.

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

/etc/protocols
	The protocols file resides in /etc.

The protocols file format appeared in BSD 4.2, describing the "known protocols used in the DARPA Internet".

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