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Using wildcards in names in Windows hosts file

John Kim |

Is there a way to create a wildcard domain in the Windows hosts file.

I tried this

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx *.somedomain.com

This does not work, is there maybe some other syntax I should use?

I am working on Windows 7

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6 Answers

There is not. The hosts file isn't very clever, you have to list every subdomain individually (including www and no-www)

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An answer to a very similar StackOverflow question worked well for me.

Wildcard Support on XP at hostsfile. Enjoy.

Basically, this program Acrylic works as a DNS proxy for your local machine. Just point your Local Area Connection to 127.0.0.1, then edit the AcrylicHosts.txt in a very similar manner to the regular hosts file -- only with wildcards!

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Dnsmasq is what you need but it doesn't work quite well on Windows. So I wrote an alternative on Windows called DNSAgent.

You can use regular expression in rules. There is also some advanced features like customizing cache TTL, non-standard-port DNS server, compression pointer mutation, etc. Open sourced under MIT license.

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first, i agree with phoshi that its not possible to do what you want in the hosts-file of windows (neither on unix).

secondly, you have to get control over the result of a request to dns. one option is to use your own dns-resolving on your router (dnsmasq, dnscache+tinydns, bind, whatever, see quack's comment) and tweak it or to use a dns-resolver on windows which you can control as you want.

see here for a list of dns-resolvers, check for the "wildcard" column, maybe powerdns or maradns or posadis is something that fits your needs.

It's another syntax: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx somedomain.com

Some examples to explain it:

  • 127.0.0.1 .com this line will block all outgoing dnsrequests ending with .com
  • 127.0.0.1 somesite.com will block all outgoing dnsrequests ending with somesite.com
  • 12.2.3.1 will lead all outgoing dnsrequests ending with to 12.2.3.1

You block/lead all second (third,fourth...) level urls with the top(second,third...) level url in the hosts file.

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If you want to block every subdomain in somedomain.com, then consider whether omitting "*." will achieve what you want.

Editing your example:

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx somedomain.com
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