As a side note to looking up hostnames from IP addresses for people who use /etc/hosts , note that /etc/hosts lookups work badly in the presence of hosts with multiple IP address, since most gethostbyname() implementations will only return the first IP address that they find in /etc/hosts . These days you really want a minimal /etc/hosts and a reliable DNS server, unless you have special concerns .

(The gethostbyname() behavior is sensible, since otherwise it would always have to scan the entire /etc/hosts file just to make sure that it had found all IP addresses for a host, even when most hosts only have one IP address.)

While there are workarounds for this issue, I think that the best way out is just to not have any entries for your multihomed hosts in /etc/hosts , even on the hosts themselves. This appears to work fine on at least modern Linuxes, and I can't imagine that the *BSDs do any worse here.

(You can have similar behavior with gethostbyaddr() , depending on how you give an IP address multiple names in /etc/hosts . Putting all the names on one line works out, but having multiple lines for one IP address has the same problem.)