MASM: dereference struct pointer twice?

Question

I've been dabbling in x86 assembly again using MASM, and ran into a small roadblock. Looking to reinvent the wheel out of pure enjoyment.

    ASSUME eax:PTR hostent
    mov ebx, [eax].h_addr_list ;this doesn't compile -- but IDE recognizes hostent.h_addr_list
   ;I think I need to dereference the pointer twice, but I have no clue how to do that with MASM.
   ;It sounds silly, yes, but doing the traditional mov eax, [eax] won't solve my compiler error

    mov ecx, [eax].h_name ;this compiles just fine

   ;mov ebx, (hostent PTR [eax]).h_addr_list ;didn't work either.
   ASSUME eax:nothing 

The problem seems to be that h_addr_list is a char **, while h_name is a char *. The error thrown is:

error A2006: undefined symbol : h_addr_list

The definition for the hostent structure is:

    typedef struct hostent {
  char FAR      *h_name; //note the char FAR *
  char FAR  FAR **h_aliases;
  short         h_addrtype;
  short         h_length;
  char FAR  FAR **h_addr_list; //note the char FAR FAR **
} HOSTENT, *PHOSTENT, FAR *LPHOSTENT;

Answer 1

I strongly suspect you are using MASM32 and have a line like this:

include \masm32\include\windows.inc

windows.inc contains the HOSTENT structure:

hostent STRUCT
  h_name      DWORD      ?
  h_alias     DWORD      ?
  h_addr      WORD       ?
  h_len       WORD       ?
  h_list      DWORD      ?
hostent ENDS

Compare that to:

typedef struct hostent {
  char FAR      *h_name; //note the char FAR *
  char FAR  FAR **h_aliases;
  short         h_addrtype;
  short         h_length;
  char FAR  FAR **h_addr_list; //note the char FAR FAR **
} HOSTENT, *PHOSTENT, FAR *LPHOSTENT;

You'll notice that h_addr_list is defined in windows.inc as h_list. You could either modify windows.inc and rename h_list or you can modify your code to reference h_list instead of h_addr_list. I would do the latter as it would keep your code compatible with others using MASM32.

It should also be clear that some of the other fields are named a bit differently as well.