A question about Localhost with Safari

[William H. Magill]

> On Jan 4, 2015, at 10:46 AM, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 at 10:34 AM, René J.V. <rjvbertin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sunday January 04 2015 09:05:42 Brandon Allbery wrote:
> 
> >From the standpoint of DNS, "localhost" is fully qualified: it is not the
> >short form of a name that is meaningful only in the context of a particular
> >domain.
> 
> AFAIK you need an entry in /etc/hosts in order for "localhost" to be defined, no?
> 
> BIND9 at least comes with a local zone definition that includes "localhost." as a name, with the usual mapping. That said, people *usually* get it from /etc/hosts... *but* OS X is a little weird in how/when it uses the hosts file.

If one believes the contents of /etc/hosts -- OSX only consults it at boot time.

Historically, OSX loaded all of the various "unix like" plain-text information files into a database. 
 (NIS  maybe?)
I haven't played extensively with this sort of stuff since I retired back in 2003, (Apple makes it so easy to forget)  but I assume that OSX (NeXTStep) has not "gotten closer" to UNIX(tm),  but continued on its divergent path.

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill                                                            

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