Quick Domain Name / IP Address / MX Record Lookup Functions

Submitted by jbreland on Fri, 05/07/2010 - 16:06

Today's tip is once again focused on Bash functions (I have a whole bunch to share; they're just too useful :-) ). These are three quick and easy functions for performing DNS lookups:

ns - perform standard resolution of hostnames or IP addresses using nslookup; only resolved names/addresses are shown in the results

mx - perform MX record lookup to determine mail servers (and priority) for a particular domain

mxip - perform MX record lookup, but return mail server IP addresses instead of host names

Here are the functions:

# Domain and MX record lookups
#   $1 = hostname, domain name, or IP address
function ns() {
    nslookup $1 | tail -n +4 | sed -e 's/^Address:[[:space:]]\+//;t;' -e 's/^.*name = \(.*\)\.$/\1/;t;d;'
}
function mx() {
    nslookup -type=mx $1 | grep 'exchanger' | sed 's/^.* exchanger = //'
}
function mxip() {
    nslookup -type=mx $1 | grep 'exchanger' | awk '{ print $NF }' | nslookup 2>/dev/null | grep -A1 '^Name:' | sed 's/^Address:[[:space:]]\+//;t;d;'
}

And finally, some examples:

$ ns mail.legroom.net # forward lookup
64.182.149.164
$ ns 64.182.149.164   # reverse lookup
mail.legroom.net
$ ns www.legroom.net  # cname example
legroom.net
64.182.149.164
$ mx legroom.net      # mx lookup
10 mail.legroom.net.
$ mxip legroom.net    # mx->ip lookup
64.182.149.164