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Using the glibc and linux, this is not so straightforward unfortunately. If you call gethostbyname and the system is setup accordingly (default on many systems) then it will instead of reading /etc/host call the nscd. I have no idea if the nscd will cache only hits in the file or try to cache it as a whole. In the later case, you would have a ram limitation for the file size (assuming that the nscd config allows that much entries)

PlasmaHH
– PlasmaHH

2017-08-29 12:08:15 +00:00
Commented Aug 29, 2017 at 12:08
1

The 4.3BSD version is here. It supported a dbm-hashed version of /etc/hosts. IIRC, dbm imposed some size limits that could cause attempts to create a hashed db to fail.

Mark Plotnick
– Mark Plotnick

2017-08-31 11:53:26 +00:00
Commented Aug 31, 2017 at 11:53
GNU libc also has libnss_db to allow use of Berkeley db files for hosts and other NSS databases (including passwd, group, shadow, services, etc). Also provides the makedb binary and a Makefile to generate .db files from plain text. There are also 3rd-party NSS plugin modules for using postgresql, mysql, sqlite, etc (but i'm not sure if they can be used for any NSS db or are limited to just passwd, group, and shadow).

cas
– cas

2022-09-12 01:01:21 +00:00
Commented Sep 12, 2022 at 1:01

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