Subdomains on localhost

Question

It is possible to use wildcard in /etc/hosts file?

For example, im developng the application that will have user-defined subdomains, like "user1.foo.bar", "user2.foo.bar".

Im looking for something like this:

127.0.0.1 foo.bar
127.0.0.1 *.foo.bar

How can i make it work ?

Answer 1

No. You need a full blown DNS server to do this.

Answer 2

No you can't as has been stated, but...

If the hostnames follow what you are saying though, you could do this with the Bash shell to save you some typing:

for i in user{1..10}; do 
    sudo bash -c "echo 127.0.0.1 ${i}.foo.bar >> /etc/hosts"
done

Or, say you have them all in a text file one host per line:

while read host; do
    sudo bash -c "echo 127.0.0.1 $host >> /etc/hosts"
done < fileName