host aliases

[Celejar <celejar@gmail.com>]

I want to configure a system-wide host alias. Say there's a host whose
DNS name is 'foo.bar'. I want any network application that asks for
'baz' to get 'foo.bar'. I know I can do this for individual apps; in
ssh, for example, I include these 2 lines in 'config':

Host		baz
HostName	foo.bar

But is this possible on an app-independent, system-wide basis? If the
host is accessed by several different apps, it would be a pain to do
this separately for each one, and a greater pain to adjust if the alias
ever changed.

/etc/hosts allows aliases of names to IP addresses, but not,
apparently, of one name to another without an IP address. Is there any
way to do what I want (preferably without needing to install a DNS
server, even a lightweight one such as dnsmasq)?

Celejar