/etc/hosts vs /private/etc/hosts

  • Posted by racoonlab
  • Tagged with

List of Mac symbolic links in private folder: 

ls -aFGl / | grep private

This will return: 

lrwxr-xr-x@   1 root       wheel       11 Jan  9 12:43 etc@ -> private/etc
drwxr-xr-x@   6 root       wheel      204 Jan  9 12:53 private/
lrwxr-xr-x@   1 root       wheel       11 Jan  9 12:44 tmp@ -> private/tmp
lrwxr-xr-x@   1 root       wheel       11 Jan  9 12:44 var@ -> private/var

This means that the difference between 

/etc/hosts

and 

private/etc/hosts

is that
/private/ is a directory and /etc/ a symlink. They both have the same contents. The same is true for /tmp and /var.

If you need to create a symlink to the “hosts” file, for example you want to have hosts in the cloud, you need to point it to /private/etc/hosts not to /etc/hosts otherwise it will not have any effect.
Actually it won’t work anyway.