dig command ?

[Frank Leonhardt]

On 04/04/2015 16:22, Ernie Luzar wrote:
> running 10.1 and went to use the dig command and its no longer part of 
> the system. Why was it removed?

As other's have said, this was removed (actually in 10.0) because it was 
compiled as part of BIND, and that was removed. You'll find nslookup has 
also gone, but host (which also part of BIND) is still there.

BIND was considered over-kill as part of the base system, but it's still 
available in ports. This doesn't explain how the "host" utility escaped 
remained part of the base system, but dig and nslookup were dropped. 
I've done some historical research since I first drew attention to this, 
and it goes back at least as far as 4.3BSD in 1986 on a VAX, and 
apparently in 2.11BSD on a PDP-11.

For a while ISC deprecated nslookup because it doesn't do its lookups 
the way some people might think it did. However, it's been around longer 
than dig and host, and people are used to it, so they un-deprecated it. 
dig, I believe, came in the middle and was also considered unworthy, in 
favour of the latest, greatest "host", which was dragged out of BIND and 
added to the base system.

I've been around a while, like nslookup, and I appreciate it being 
there; it's even available on Windoze it's that universal! If you want 
nslookup or dig you DON'T have to install the whole BIND package as is 
often suggested; just find nslookup.c (it's in the same directory as 
host and dig on the ISC source bundle) and compile and copy in to /usr/bin.