NAME

getnameinfo - address-to-name translation in protocol-independent manner

SYNOPSIS

#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <netdb.h>

int getnameinfo(const struct sockaddr *sa, socklen_t salen,
                char *host, size_t hostlen,
                char *serv, size_t servlen, int flags);

DESCRIPTION

The getnameinfo() function is defined for protocol-independent address-to-nodename translation. It combines the functionality of gethostbyaddr(3) and getservbyport(3) and is the inverse of getaddrinfo(3). The sa argument is a pointer to a generic socket address structure (of type sockaddr_in or sockaddr_in6) of size salen that holds the input IP address and port number. The arguments host and serv are pointers to buffers (of size hostlen and servlen respectively) to hold the return values.

The caller can specify that no hostname (or no service name) is required by providing a NULL host (or serv) argument or a zero hostlen (or servlen) parameter. However, at least one of hostname or service name must be requested.

The flags argument modifies the behavior of getnameinfo() as follows:

NI_NOFQDN

If set, return only the hostname part of the FQDN for local hosts.

NI_NUMERICHOST

If set, then the numeric form of the hostname is returned. (When not set, this will still happen in case the node's name cannot be looked up.)

NI_NAMEREQD

If set, then a error is returned if the hostname cannot be looked up.

NI_NUMERICSERV

If set, then the service address is returned in numeric form, for example by its port number.

NI_DGRAM

If set, then the service is datagram (UDP) based rather than stream (TCP) based. This is required for the few ports (512-514) that have different services for UDP and TCP.

RETURN VALUE

On success 0 is returned, and node and service names, if requested, are filled with null-terminated strings, possibly truncated to fit the specified buffer lengths. On error one of the following non-zero error codes is returned:

EAI_AGAIN

The name could not be resolved at this time. Try again later.

EAI_BADFLAGS

The flags parameter has an invalid value.

EAI_FAIL

A non-recoverable error occurred.

EAI_FAMILY

The address family was not recognized, or the address length was invalid for the specified family.

EAI_MEMORY

Out of memory.

EAI_NONAME

The name does not resolve for the supplied parameters. NI_NAMEREQD is set and the host's name cannot be located, or neither hostname nor service name were requested.

EAI_OVERFLOW

The buffer pointed to by host or serv was too small.

EAI_SYSTEM

A system error occurred. The error code can be found in errno.

The gai_strerror(3) function translates these error codes to a human readable string, suitable for error reporting.

FILES

/etc/hosts
/etc/nsswitch.conf
/etc/resolv.conf

CONFORMING TO

RFC 2553, POSIX.1-2001.

NOTES

In order to assist the programmer in choosing reasonable sizes for the supplied buffers, <netdb.h> defines the constants

# define NI_MAXHOST      1025
# define NI_MAXSERV      32

The former is the constant MAXDNAME in recent versions of BIND's <arpa/nameser.h> header file. The latter is a guess based on the services listed in the current Assigned Numbers RFC.

EXAMPLE

The following code tries to get the numeric hostname and service name, for a given socket address. Note that there is no hardcoded reference to a particular address family.

struct sockaddr *sa;    /* input */
char hbuf[NI_MAXHOST], sbuf[NI_MAXSERV];
if (getnameinfo(sa, sa->sa_len, hbuf, sizeof(hbuf), sbuf,

            sizeof(sbuf), NI_NUMERICHOST | NI_NUMERICSERV) == 0)

    printf("host=%s, serv=%s\n", hbuf, sbuf);

The following version checks if the socket address has a reverse address mapping.

struct sockaddr *sa;    /* input */
char hbuf[NI_MAXHOST];
if (getnameinfo(sa, sa->sa_len, hbuf, sizeof(hbuf),

            NULL, 0, NI_NAMEREQD))

    printf("could not resolve hostname");
else

    printf("host=%s\n", hbuf);

An example program using getnameinfo() can be found in getaddrinfo(3).

SEE ALSO

socket(2), getaddrinfo(3), gethostbyaddr(3), getservbyname(3), getservbyport(3), inet_ntop(3), hosts(5), services(5), hostname(7), named(8)

R. Gilligan, S. Thomson, J. Bound and W. Stevens, Basic Socket Interface Extensions for IPv6, RFC 2553, March 1999.

Tatsuya Jinmei and Atsushi Onoe, An Extension of Format for IPv6 Scoped Addresses, internet draft, work in progress. ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ipngwg-scopedaddr-format-02.txt

Craig Metz, Protocol Independence Using the Sockets API, Proceedings of the freenix track: 2000 USENIX annual technical conference, June 2000. http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix2000/freenix/metzprotocol.html

COLOPHON

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