On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 12:42:17 -0800, john330 wrote:

>> $ man -s 7 hostname
>
> Thanks for the suggestion but that says nothing about what the symbolic
> name is for. I'm looking for the difference between setting the
> hostname and the symbolic host name and when these two would be
> different.

The name asked for during installation *is* the hostname and is found not
only in /etc/hosts but in /etc/myname also.