[dns-operations] dig, drill, delve, kdig, sdig, tdig mission statements

[Paul Vixie]

Mukund Sivaraman wrote:
> ...
>
> A query tool can serve some purposes:
>
> * General lookup
> * Diagnosis of protocol/feature support
> * Load generation and printing of graphs, etc.
> * Tracing resolution and DNSSEC validation (along the lines of dnsviz), and related diagnosis
> * Pretty-printing to assist a user (i.e., printing more than just the presentation format)
> * Pretty-printing for parsing in formats such as XML,JSON
>
> I feel that having separate query tool flavours by different parties is
> useful and necessary, but a 3rd party tool is good to have too.

indeed. in 2008 i wrote a small C program to perform arbitrary DNS 
lookups from within shell scripts. its output looks like this:

$ dnsget -a -s 2001:559:8000::2 redbarn.org ns
NOERROR 4 0 2
ANSWER redbarn.org NS ams.sns-pb.isc.org
ANSWER redbarn.org NS sfba.sns-pb.isc.org
ANSWER redbarn.org NS ord.sns-pb.isc.org
ANSWER redbarn.org NS ns.lah1.vix.su
ADDITIONAL ns.lah1.vix.su AAAA 2001:559:8000::2
ADDITIONAL ns.lah1.vix.su A 24.104.150.234

no dependencies beyond -lresolv which is built into the C library on 
most systems. it's small, too.

$ wc dnsget.c
      512    1688   11919 dnsget.c

i've put a copy on http://family.redbarn.org/~vixie/dnsget.c -- an 
exercise for the reader is to make it use -lgetdns 
(https://getdnsapi.net/) rather than -lresolv, and write a man page.

-- 
P Vixie