Fun with Dig

—Joel Rennich,

Updated 10 November 2002

Dig Dig is shipped as part of Mac OS X, and as such is definitely compatible with Jaguar.

Dig, or Domain Internetworking Groper, (aren’t UNIX geeks great?) is an incredibly useful troubleshooting and informational tool. It will allow you to do DNS queries from the command line on any DNS server. For example to find out what IP a site has do:

dig www.afp548.com

To do this same command, but query a different DNS server (204.69.234.1) instead of what is set in your network preference pane:

dig @204.69.234.1 www.afp548.com

To find out what server takes mail for afp548.com do:

dig afp548.com mx

And lastly to reverse an IP address:

dig -x 66.92.146.93

Go out and look up DNS records.