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Comment by cytzol | Hacker News Reader

I didn't think that feature fit. Would people really use a general DNS client for this? I use nslookup.

It already works in dog, so just a matter of adding an option to alleviate the manual work:

  $ dig +short -x 209.216.230.240
  news.ycombinator.com.
  $ dog PTR 240.230.216.209.in-addr.arpa.
  PTR 240.230.216.209.in-addr.arpa. 23h59m44s   "news.ycombinator.com."

And yes, I use dig -x quite often.

Does it need to be an option ? I'm accustomed to using host and it just does it by default if it is given an IP as argument.

This is my thinking too. I could add the option if there's enough interest, but aren't there already dedicated tools to do this?

As an example: I sometimes run 'curl ifconfig.me' to get my public IP from the command-line, but I wouldn't expect curl to add an '--ip' option to make this specific query easier to run. curl is a general tool, and the fact that you can use HTTP to get your public IP doesn't mean it needs a top-level option in an HTTP client. (I get that reverse lookup is an internet standard, and ifconfig.me is a third-party service, but still.)

I don't think gp is against the feature. They're saying

  dog 209.216.230.240

should directly perform a PTR lookup instead of requiring something like

  dog -x 209.216.230.240

Here's how host works when you give it an IP address as opposed to a domain name:

  $ host 209.216.230.240
  240.230.216.209.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer news.ycombinator.com.
  $ host news.ycombinator.com
  news.ycombinator.com has address 209.216.230.240

In my work I use dig -x extensively, and would love to see a similar feature in dog.

If it can see that an argument is an IP address and automatically do the PTR lookup for me, even better!

dig has got the `-x` switch that simplifies the reverse lookups.

I would +1 that I use dig for this all the time.

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