ethers(5)

ethers5

Ethernet address to ip number database

Overview

/etc/ethers contains 48 bit Ethernet addresses and their corresponding IP numbers, one line for each IP number:

Ethernet-address IP-number

The two items are separated by any number of SPACE and/or TAB characters. A # at the beginning of a line starts a comment which extends to the end of the line. The Ethernet-address is written as x:x:x:x:x:x, where x is a hexadecimal number between 0 and ff which represents one byte of the address, which is in network byte order (big-endian). The IP-number may be a hostname which can be resolved by DNS or a dot separated number.

Examples

08:00:20:00:61:CA pal

Files

/etc/ethers

Releases

16 releases since Debian 2.0 (Hamm); the text changed 3 times.

  1. 2.0–3.1
  2. 4.0–8
  3. 9–11
  4. 12–Arch

From net-tools 2.10-3 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.