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Does it mean the same as send to localhost ?

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possible duplicate of superuser.com/questions/137846/… –  Sathya May 5 '10 at 15:21
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up vote 5 down vote accepted

Effectively, yes it does mean the same thing, though as @quack points out it's not always as straightforward as that.

Wikipedia article

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I like this Simple answer lot! –  user31356 May 5 '10 at 15:29
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Kind of. localhost is the customary hostname for which is the customary IP address assigned to the loopback interface. The loopback is like a virtual network adapter that lets your computer talk to itself via typical networking protocols.

While is the most common IPv4 address for the loopback interface, any address in the 127/8 network (meaning any IP address between and is in the loopback network and can be used as loopback addresses.

Similarly, any other valid hostname may be assigned to via DNS or your computer's hosts file. Any access to those names will access the loopback interface as well.

It is also possible, though rare, to redefine localhost to point to some other non-loopback IP address. But most networking software doesn't expect this and it may cause things to fail unexpectedly.

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