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GETHOSTNAME(2) Linux Programmer's Manual GETHOSTNAME(2)
NAME
gethostname, sethostname - get/set hostname
SYNOPSIS
#include <unistd.h>
int gethostname(char *name, size_t len);
int sethostname(const char *name, size_t len);
Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)):
gethostname():
_XOPEN_SOURCE >= 500 || _POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200112L
|| /* Glibc 2.19 and earlier */ _BSD_SOURCE
sethostname():
Since glibc 2.21:
_DEFAULT_SOURCE
In glibc 2.19 and 2.20:
_DEFAULT_SOURCE || (_XOPEN_SOURCE && _XOPEN_SOURCE < 500)
Up to and including glibc 2.19:
_BSD_SOURCE || (_XOPEN_SOURCE && _XOPEN_SOURCE < 500)
DESCRIPTION
These system calls are used to access or to change the system hostname. More precisely, they operate on the hostname associated with the calling process's UTS
namespace.
sethostname() sets the hostname to the value given in the character array name. The len argument specifies the number of bytes in name. (Thus, name does not
require a terminating null byte.)
gethostname() returns the null-terminated hostname in the character array name, which has a length of len bytes. If the null-terminated hostname is too large to
fit, then the name is truncated, and no error is returned (but see NOTES below). POSIX.1 says that if such truncation occurs, then it is unspecified whether the
returned buffer includes a terminating null byte.
RETURN VALUE
On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set to indicate the error.
ERRORS
EFAULT name is an invalid address.
EINVAL len is negative or, for sethostname(), len is larger than the maximum allowed size.
ENAMETOOLONG
(glibc gethostname()) len is smaller than the actual size. (Before version 2.1, glibc uses EINVAL for this case.)
EPERM For sethostname(), the caller did not have the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability in the user namespace associated with its UTS namespace (see namespaces(7)).
CONFORMING TO
SVr4, 4.4BSD (these interfaces first appeared in 4.2BSD). POSIX.1-2001 and POSIX.1-2008 specify gethostname() but not sethostname().
NOTES
SUSv2 guarantees that "Host names are limited to 255 bytes". POSIX.1 guarantees that "Host names (not including the terminating null byte) are limited to
HOST_NAME_MAX bytes". On Linux, HOST_NAME_MAX is defined with the value 64, which has been the limit since Linux 1.0 (earlier kernels imposed a limit of 8
bytes).
C library/kernel differences
The GNU C library does not employ the gethostname() system call; instead, it implements gethostname() as a library function that calls uname(2) and copies up to
len bytes from the returned nodename field into name. Having performed the copy, the function then checks if the length of the nodename was greater than or
equal to len, and if it is, then the function returns -1 with errno set to ENAMETOOLONG; in this case, a terminating null byte is not included in the returned
name.
Versions of glibc before 2.2 handle the case where the length of the nodename was greater than or equal to len differently: nothing is copied into name and the
function returns -1 with errno set to ENAMETOOLONG.
SEE ALSO
hostname(1), getdomainname(2), setdomainname(2), uname(2), uts_namespaces(7)
Linux 2021-03-22 GETHOSTNAME(2)