protocols(5)

protocols5

Protocol name database

Overview

The protocols file contains information regarding the known protocols used in the Internet. For each protocol, a single line should be present with the following information:

official protocol name
protocol number
aliases

Items are separated by any number of blanks and/or tab characters.

A hash mark (‘#’) indicates the beginning of a comment; subsequent characters up to the end of the line are not interpreted by the routines which search the file.

Protocol names may contain any printable character other than a field delimiter, newline, or comment character.

Files

/etc/protocols

Releases

61 releases since OpenBSD 2.1; the text changed 8 times.

  1. 2.1–2.2
  2. 2.3–2.4
  3. 2.5
  4. 2.6
  5. 2.7
  6. 2.8–3.3
  7. 3.4–4.1
  8. 4.2–6.4
  9. 6.5–8.0

History

The protocols file format appeared in 4.2BSD.

Bugs

A name server should be used instead of a static file. Lines in /etc/protocols are limited to BUFSIZ characters (currently 1024). Longer lines will be ignored.

From man 8.0-current-20261101 in OpenBSD 8.0-current (2026-11-01). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.