Recently I'm doing a lot of networking again. In order to do so I needed to have the right tools available. One that I'm using surprisingly often is dig. That's why we are going to take a quick look at it. Let's go! 🤓

What is dig?

From the dig man-page:

dig is a flexible tool for interrogating DNS name servers. It performs DNS lookups and displays the answers that are returned from the name server(s) that were queried. Most DNS administrators use dig to troubleshoot DNS problems because of its flexibility, ease of use, and clarity of output.

Put short: dig is a DNS lookup utility 😉

How to install dig?

Fedora

sudo dnf install bind-utils

Ubuntu

sudo apt install dnsutils

How to use the dig command line tool?

dig example.com

The result of the dig command is quite long, so I let you take a look at it on your own 😉

How to only show the answer of the dig command line tool?

dig +noall +answer example.com

Ok, so this is way more compact!

example.com.		7036	IN	A	93.184.216.34

How to specify the DNS server to use when executing dig?

dig @dns-server example.com

Personally I'm using the google DNS server.

dig @8.8.8.8 example.com

How to specify the type of DNS record to read out using dig?

As you probably know, there are different types of DNS records. You can filter by the type of DNS record using the dig command line tool.

dig example.com <type>
# example using MX record type
dig example.com MX

How to specify the default arguments for dig?

It is possible to store the default arguments for the dig command line tool within a ~/.digrc file.

+noall +answer @8.8.8.8

And that's it! Now you know how to use the dig command line tool in order to read DNS records from any DNS server 💪 Have fun with it! 😁