An array of strings, I would suppose, like the system call.

Then again, Perl doesn't return an array when there's only one alias. Maybe it returns one at most? 

$ perl -MData::Dumper -e'print Dumper $_ for (gethostbyname $ARGV[0])[
+0,1]' www.google.com
$VAR1 = 'www.l.google.com';
$VAR1 = 'www.google.com';

[download]

Update: They are space-joined. From pp_sys.c: 

PUSHs(space_join_names_mortal(hent->h_aliases));

[download]

In reply to Re: gethostbyname: What does $aliases look like? by ikegami
in thread gethostbyname: What does $aliases look like? by Skeeve

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