How to edit hosts file on MacOS

On MacOS, hosts file is present at two places i.e /etc/hosts and /private/etc/hosts. Bit if you do detailed listing on /etc path, you will notice that its pointing to /private/etc/hosts file.

chetnachaudhari@chetnas-MacBook-Pro:~$ ls -lsa /etc
8 lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root  wheel  11 Jan 12  2017 /etc -> private/etc

To update new hosts entry on your machine, edit /private/etc/hosts file. Following is sample of how this file looks:

chetnachaudhari@chetnas-MacBook-Pro:~$ cat /private/etc/hosts
##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting.  Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1   localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1             localhost