On Fri 19 Mar, 1999, tkaczma@gryf.net wrote:

By this measure hostnames which are not fully qualified are illegal. Thus

The number of problems that can be caused by not using fully qualified names everywhere - I wish it were disallowed!

But the intent of the specification is pretty clear with its comment about four groups of decimal digits.

(Having finally gone to look at the BSD source, the bit of code that allows this to work is in inet_aton, and it is behaviour that the manual page documents. But most people wouldn't know or expect things like '127.1' to be the same as '127.0.0.1' either...)

James.