On: Fun with IP address parsing

[knorker]

0 connects to localhost. It's shorter.

[firethief → knorker]

0 is 0.0.0.0, which is not a valid address for most purposes. Some programs, like iputils ping, have special handling for that case (i.e. using it as an alias for the unroutable host address); some programs, like FreeBSD's ping, do not [1]. Unlike most of these address tricks, it's not standardized, except that treating it as a normal address is technically disallowed.

1: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/99336/how-does-ping...

[knorker → firethief]

Not quite. Yes, that may be true for ping, but ping is very much special. It builds its raw packets.

But do a "strace -econnect nc 0 22" and you'll see that yes, actually, a connect() syscall to "0.0.0.0" does connect to localhost.

[firethief → knorker]

Interesting. That doesn't seem to be specified in the RFC1122 standard or the Linux ip(7) docs, but it's an explicit special case in the kernel (ip_route_output_key_hash_rcu):

        if (!fl4->daddr) {
                fl4->daddr = fl4->saddr;
                if (!fl4->daddr)
                        fl4->daddr = fl4->saddr = htonl(INADDR_LOOPBACK);
                ...

[smusamashah → knorker]

wow this is shortest way to localhost