It's not specified behaviour. In linux it's a hack: http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/net/ipv4/af_inet.c#L809 Looks like it has been around a _long_ time: https://github.com/davidbau/davej/commit/c0f75cadd14f3cec8b770526f2f3cc3027606d19#diff-9783279e0dd62b9f996300a8127ec964R758