getdomainname(3)

getdomainname3

Get/set the nis domain name of current host

Usage

#include <unistd.h>

int

getdomainname(char *name, int namelen);

int

setdomainname(const char *name, int namelen);

Library

Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

Overview

The getdomainname() function returns the standard NIS domain name for the current host, as previously set by setdomainname(). The namelen argument specifies the size of the name array. The returned name is null-terminated unless insufficient space is provided.

The setdomainname() function sets the NIS domain name of the host machine to be name, which has length namelen. This call is restricted to the super-user and is normally used only when the system is bootstrapped.

Return values

The getdomainname() function returns the value 0 if successful; otherwise the value -1 is returned and the global variable errno is set to indicate the error.

Errors

The following errors may be returned by these calls:

[EFAULT]

The name or namelen argument gave an invalid address.

[EPERM]

The caller tried to set the hostname and was not the super-user.

Releases

87 releases since FreeBSD 2.0.5-RELEASE; the text changed 49 times.

  1. 2.0.5
  2. 2.1.5–2.1.7.1
  3. 2.2.2–2.2.8
  4. 2.2.9
  5. 3.0–3.2
  6. 3.3–3.4
  7. 3.5–3.5.1
  8. 4.0
  9. 4.1–4.2
  10. 4.3
  11. 4.4
  12. 4.5–4.11
  13. 5.0
  14. 5.1
  15. 5.2–5.2.1
  16. 5.3–5.5
  17. 6.0–6.3
  18. 6.4
  19. 7.0
  20. 7.1
  21. 7.2
  22. 7.3
  23. 7.4
  24. 8.0
  25. 8.1
  26. 8.2
  27. 8.3
  28. 8.4
  29. 9.0
  30. 9.1
  31. 9.2
  32. 9.3
  33. 10.0
  34. 10.1
  35. 10.2
  36. 10.3
  37. 10.4
  38. 11.0
  39. 11.1
  40. 11.2
  41. 11.3
  42. 11.4
  43. 12.0
  44. 12.1
  45. 12.2
  46. 12.3
  47. 12.4
  48. 13.0–13.2
  49. 13.3–14.5
  50. 15.0–16.0

History

The getdomainname() function appeared in 4.2BSD.

Bugs

Domain names are limited to MAXHOSTNAMELEN (from ⟨sys/param.h⟩) characters, currently 256.

From base 16.0-CURRENT-20261027-61c70dc16a79 in FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT (2026-10-27). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.