Utilities like host
and dig
let you see the IP address corresponding to the host name.
There is also the getent
utility that can be used to query /etc/hosts
or other NSS databases.
I am looking for a convenient standard utility (which is available in Debian, say) which resolves a host name regardless of where it is defined.
It should be more or less equivalent to
ping "$HOST" | head -1 | perl -lne '/\((.*?)\)/ && print $1'
Best Answer
The only command that I am aware that does what you want is resolveip:
http://linux.die.net/man/1/resolveip
However it only comes with mysql-server, which may not be ideal to install everywhere.