Does struct hostent have a field “h_addr”?

Question

I encountered the following code snapshot:

struct hostent *hp;
 hp = my_gethostbyname(localhost);
    if (hp == NULL) {
       ls_syslog(LOG_ERR, I18N_FUNC_FAIL, fname, "my_gethostbyname()");
       return -1;
    }
    strcpy(localhost, hp->h_name);

    memcpy(&addr, hp->h_addr, hp->h_length);

I am rather confused by the last statement, the declaration of struct hostent is like this:

struct hostent {
   char *h_name;       /* official name of host */
   char **h_aliases;   /* alias list */
   int h_addrtype;     /* host address type */
   int h_length;       /* length of address */
   char **h_addr_list; /* list of addresses */
};

It doesn't have a field named "h_addr", but the code did can compile, can anyone tell me why? thanks.

Answer 1

You missed this bit right under it:

#define h_addr h_addr_list[0] /* for backward compatibility */

So no, there is no problem.

Answer 2

In the GNU's documentation page they says

"Recall that the host might be connected to multiple networks and have different addresses on each one"

they also provide a h_addr which is just the first element of the vector h_addr_list.

Answer 3

h_addr is not POSIX. See POSIX netdb.h. Using h_addr could result in error: ‘struct hostent’ has no member named ‘h_addr’. Portable code should use h_addr_list instead.

Answer 4

Note that the h_addr macro is on some systems only visible if you define _BSD_SOURCE and/or _DEFAULT_SOURCE before including header files.