🚀 go-pugleaf

Ralph> == Ralph Sims <ralphs@halcyon.com> 

 Ralph> Dig has proven especially useful, and is used by the folks at
 Ralph> the NIC more than nslookup, it seems.

I don't know about the NIC, but I use dig in preference to nslookup.

 Ralph> And then there's a 'simple' (for somebody) trick that you can
 Ralph> use in your login profiles:
[wrapped for clarity]
 Ralph> alias ptr echo \!$ \| awk -F. \'\{printf \"set
 Ralph> q=PTR\\n%s.%s.%s.%s.in-addr.arpa\\n\",\$4,\$3,\$2,\$1\}\' \|
 Ralph> nslookup

The dig equivalent to this is:

alias ptr 'dig -x'

dig is great.  It's on venera.isi.edu, though I don't remember the exact
directory, it should be pretty obvious.

Other nice things about dig come from its nature as a command-line tool;
you can use whatever shell command-line editing you're used to, unlike
with nslookup.

Example: to look up MX records, then HINFO, for a particular machine:

nslookup:
> set q=mx
> foo.bar.dom.
[results]
> set q=hinfo
> foo.bar.dom.
[results]

dig:
% dig foo.bar.dom. mx
[results]
% ^mx^hinfo
[results]

And my favorite dig trick (thanks Randal):
% dig . ns +aa @nearest.root.server > /var/domain/root.cache

Since dig outputs its results in BIND file format (complete with
comments, prefixed with ';') it's great for piping/appending stuff (say,
doing a manual zone transfer to a file so you can prime your secondaries).
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