Get or set a unique 32-bit identifier for the current machine.
The 32-bit identifier is intended to be unique among all Unix systems in
existence.
This normally resembles the Internet address for the local
machine, as returned by
gethostbyname(3),
and thus usually never needs to be set.
The
sethostid()
call is restricted to the superuser.
The
hostid
argument is stored in the file
/etc/hostid.
RETURN VALUE
gethostid()
returns the 32-bit identifier for the current host as set by
sethostid().
FILES
/etc/hostid
CONFORMING TO
4.2BSD; these functions were dropped in 4.4BSD.
SVr4 includes
gethostid()
but not
sethostid().
POSIX.1-2001 specifies
gethostid()
but not
sethostid().
NOTES
In the glibc implementation, if
gethostid()
cannot open
/etc/hostid,
then it obtains the hostname using
gethostname(2),
passes that hostname to
gethostbyname_r(3)
in order to obtain the host's IPv4 address,
and returns a value obtained by bit-twiddling the IPv4 address.
(This value may not be unique.)
This page is part of release 3.14 of the Linux
man-pages
project.
A description of the project,
and information about reporting bugs,
can be found at
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.