Why do I sometimes lose a server's address when using more than

Why do I sometimes lose a server's address when using more than 


  From Andrew Gierth (andrew@erlenstar.demon.co.uk):

  Take a careful look at struct hostent. Notice that almost everything
  in it is a pointer? All these pointers will refer to statically
  allocated data.

  For example, if you do:

           struct hostent *host = gethostbyname(hostname);

  then (as you should know) a subsequent call to gethostbyname() will
  overwrite the structure pointed to by 'host'.

  But if you do:

           struct hostent myhost;
           struct hostent *hostptr = gethostbyname(hostname);
           if (hostptr) myhost = *host;

  to make a copy of the hostent before it gets overwritten, then it
  still gets clobbered by a subsequent call to gethostbyname(), since
  although myhost won't get overwritten, all the data it is pointing to
  will be.

  You can get round this by doing a proper 'deep copy' of the hostent
  structure, but this is tedious. My recommendation would be to extract
  the needed fields of the hostent and store them in your own way.

  Robin Paterson (etmrpat@etm.ericsson.se) has added:

  It might be nice if you mention MT safe libraries provide
  complimentary functions for multithreaded programming.  On the solaris
  machine I'm typing at, we have gethostbyname and gethostbyname_r (_r
  for reentrant).  The main difference is, you provide the storage for
  the hostent struct so you always have a local copy and not just a
  pointer to the static copy.

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