It's a particularly cursed form of writing IPv4 addresses: > A popular implementation of IP networking, originating in 4.2BSD, contains a function inet_aton()

It's a particularly cursed form of writing IPv4 addresses: > A popular implementation of IP networking, originating in 4.2BSD, contains a function inet_aton() for converting IP addresses in character string representation to internal binary storage. In addition to the basic four-decimals format and 32-bit numbers, it also supported intermediate syntax forms of octet.24bits (e.g. 10.1234567; for Class A addresses) and octet.octet.16bits (e.g. 172.16.12345; for Class B addresses). It also allowed the numbers to be written in hexadecimal and octal representations, by prefixing them with 0x and 0, respectively. These features continue to be supported in some software, even though they are considered as non-standard. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-decimal_notation#IPv4_address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-decimal_notation#IPv4_addr...) Never use this.