nslookup and drill: DNS resolution in terminal

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The server won’t resolve a domain, but pings fly through. No familiar dig at hand — the BIOS is already loading a minimal busybox. Or on a host without bind-tools. nslookup and drill fill this gap: the first one is built into almost everything, the second gives more context when debugging.

nslookup: interactive and one-liner modes

nslookup ships with bind-utils and isc-dhcp-client. It works in two modes.

dig: DNS Query Debugging in CLI

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

DNS resolvers return the wrong address, clients don’t see updates, or it’s unclear which server is handling requests. dig (Domain Information Groper) is the standard CLI tool for DNS diagnostics. Works on Linux, macOS, and Windows via WSL.

Installation

# Debian/Ubuntu
apt install dnsutils

# RHEL/CentOS/Alma
dnf install bind-utils

# macOS — ships with the system
# Windows — via WSL or ISC official binaries

Basic Flags

dig has two classes of options: short flags (start with -) control query behavior, while keywords with + control output format.

Dns on Lead DevOps

nslookup and drill: DNS resolution in terminal

nslookup: interactive and one-liner modes

dig: DNS Query Debugging in CLI

Installation

Basic Flags