Re: [PATCH] Fix \H: Use getaddrinfo to get full hostname

[Greg Wooledge]

On Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 04:38:06PM +0200, Thomas Deutschmann wrote:
> Can you tell me more about your system and how you (your administrator)
> set up your system so that hostname will return FQDN?

It's common outside the Linux world.

# hostname
minea.eeg.ccf.org
# uname -a
HP-UX minea B.11.11 U 9000/785 4239047153 unlimited-user license

> I hope you are not talking about putting FQDN into a file which is
> expecting hostname only...

Yes, many people do precisely that.  They configure their systems
so the "hostname" command returns an FQDN, as I showed above.  (Not
my design, not my choice.)

This is what bash's \H vs. \h is for.  If your system's hostname
has dots in it, \h shows only the part up to the first dot (because
that's usually what you want in your prompt -- the shorter version),
and \H is available just in case you actually want the full version.