9.7. gethostbyname(), gethostbyaddr()

Get an IP address for a hostname, or vice-versa

Prototypes

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

struct hostent *gethostbyname(const char *name); // DEPRECATED!
struct hostent *gethostbyaddr(const char *addr, int len, int type);

Description

PLEASE NOTE: these two functions are superseded by getaddrinfo() and getnameinfo()! In particular, gethostbyname() doesn't work well with IPv6.

These functions map back and forth between host names and IP addresses. For instance, if you have "www.example.com", you can use gethostbyname() to get its IP address and store it in a struct in_addr.

Conversely, if you have a struct in_addr or a struct in6_addr, you can use gethostbyaddr() to get the hostname back. gethostbyaddr() is IPv6 compatible, but you should use the newer shinier getnameinfo() instead.

(If you have a string containing an IP address in dots-and-numbers format that you want to look up the hostname of, you'd be better off using getaddrinfo() with the AI_CANONNAME flag.)

gethostbyname() takes a string like "www.yahoo.com", and returns a struct hostent which contains tons of information, including the IP address. (Other information is the official host name, a list of aliases, the address type, the length of the addresses, and the list of addresses—it's a general-purpose structure that's pretty easy to use for our specific purposes once you see how.)

gethostbyaddr() takes a struct in_addr or struct in6_addr and brings you up a corresponding host name (if there is one), so it's sort of the reverse of gethostbyname(). As for parameters, even though addr is a char*, you actually want to pass in a pointer to a struct in_addr. len should be sizeof(struct in_addr), and type should be AF_INET.

So what is this struct hostent that gets returned? It has a number of fields that contain information about the host in question.

Return Value

Returns a pointer to a resultant struct hostent or success, or NULL on error.

Instead of the normal perror() and all that stuff you'd normally use for error reporting, these functions have parallel results in the variable h_errno, which can be printed using the functions herror() or hstrerror(). These work just like the classic errno, perror(), and strerror() functions you're used to.

Example

// THIS IS A DEPRECATED METHOD OF GETTING HOST NAMES
// use getaddrinfo() instead!

#include <stdio.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <netdb.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>
#include <arpa/inet.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    int i;
    struct hostent *he;
    struct in_addr **addr_list;

    if (argc != 2) {
        fprintf(stderr,"usage: ghbn hostname\n");
        return 1;
    }

    if ((he = gethostbyname(argv[1])) == NULL) {  // get the host info
        herror("gethostbyname");
        return 2;
    }

    // print information about this host:
    printf("Official name is: %s\n", he->h_name);
    printf("    IP addresses: ");
    addr_list = (struct in_addr **)he->h_addr_list;
    for(i = 0; addr_list[i] != NULL; i++) {
        printf("%s ", inet_ntoa(*addr_list[i]));
    }
    printf("\n");

    return 0;
}

// THIS HAS BEEN SUPERCEDED
// use getnameinfo() instead!

struct hostent *he;
struct in_addr ipv4addr;
struct in6_addr ipv6addr;

inet_pton(AF_INET, "192.0.2.34", &ipv4addr);
he = gethostbyaddr(&ipv4addr, sizeof ipv4addr, AF_INET);
printf("Host name: %s\n", he->h_name);

inet_pton(AF_INET6, "2001:db8:63b3:1::beef", &ipv6addr);
he = gethostbyaddr(&ipv6addr, sizeof ipv6addr, AF_INET6);
printf("Host name: %s\n", he->h_name);

See Also

getaddrinfo(), getnameinfo(), gethostname(), errno, perror(), strerror(), struct in_addr