i'd like to parse out the ip address of a given hostname from nslookup or dig. even better would be a way to get nslookup just to print out the ip only (did a man nslookup but didnt see the option).

here is what i know:

nslookup hostname -sil will print out 7 lines:

1. Server: IP.OF.Nameserver
2. Address: IP.OF.Nameserver:portnumber
3.Blank Line
4.Non-authoritative answer:
5.Name: hostname
6.Address: IP.OF.Host
7.Blank Line


knowing this, the script would only have to grab the 6th line (5 if you count from 0) and then the second word of that line (if you delimit based on white space).

I can do this in Java if the information from nslookup is stored to a file but that's is not very efficient at all because after i get the ip i have to do some DNS stuff with it to update an IP address.

i'd rather not use perl, but i'll take any suggestions or code slices anyone is willing to give me for this. right now im looking into some shell scripting but i thought i'd ask here in the meantime.

Thanks,

Robert

Instead of nslookup you should use host. So your command looks like host -t a www.linuxquestions.org
In this case:

The egrep part is required because of aliases (CNAME). You can probably adjust the egrep ... I'm not yet that familar with regular expressions :-)

PERFECT.

also, that iptables script u wrote a while back came in handy also.

thanks man.

No problem ... do you want to transfer some $ to my bank account? :-) Just joking of course!

lol

You could forget awk too if you use resolveip:
resolveip -s www.linuxquestions.org

Well resolveip is only included in the mysql server package in Debian.

Thanx guys , I learnt a new thing
all these days I used

ping -c 1 www.linuxquestions.org | cut -d " " -f 3 | egrep 1

to find the i.p