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up vote 31 down vote favorite
8

What's the most concise way to resolve a hostname to an IP address in a Bash script? I'm using Arch Linux.

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8 Answers

up vote 35 down vote accepted

With host from the dnsutils package:

$ host unix.stackexchange.com
unix.stackexchange.com has address 64.34.119.12

(Corrected package name according to the comments. As a note other distributions have host is different packages: Ubuntu bind9-host, openSUSE bind-utils, Frugalware bind.)

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4  
Did you mean dnsutils? Anyway, host worked nice, thanks – eugene y Sep 15 '11 at 14:55
You're probably right. I have no Arch here to check. (Intended to append a comment later mentioning this, but the answer was already upvoted so I supposed I nailed it...) – manatwork Sep 15 '11 at 15:06
Yes, it is in dnsutils. – Chris Down Sep 15 '11 at 16:16
See the resolveip entry below if you need to resolve something not in DNS (e.g. /etc/hosts) – Gavin Brock Jul 2 '12 at 8:56
Be aware that host sometimes returns multi-line output (in the case of redirects), you'll want host unix.stackexchange.com | tail -n1 if you just want the line with the IP address. – Edward Coffey Jan 23 at 5:04
up vote 31 down vote

As Heinzi said below, the best way is to use dig with the +short argument.

dig +short unix.stackexchange.com

If +short is unavailable for some reason, any one of the following should work:

host unix.stackexchange.com | awk '/^[[:alnum:].-]+ has address/ { print $4 }'
nslookup unix.stackexchange.com | awk '/^Address: / { print $2 }'
dig unix.stackexchange.com | awk '/^;; ANSWER SECTION:$/ { getline ; print $5 }'

If you want to only print one IP, then add the exit command to awk's workflow.

dig +short unix.stackexchange.com | awk '{ print ; exit }'
host unix.stackexchange.com | awk '/^[[:alnum:].-]+ has address/ { print $4 ; exit }'
nslookup unix.stackexchange.com | awk '/^Address: / { print $2 ; exit }'
dig unix.stackexchange.com | awk '/^;; ANSWER SECTION:$/ { getline ; print $5 ; exit }'
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+1 for showing how to solve the "more than one IP" issue. – Heinzi Sep 15 '11 at 18:56
1  
+1 That toughs me a great example for awk as well – rahmanisback Sep 15 '11 at 23:12
+1 for using dig. host is nice, but it's also nice to have options. – alesplin Sep 21 '11 at 2:12
2  
By default, using dig only works with ipv4, where host gives both ipv4 and ipv6 answers. This might be unexpected. You can try host www.google.com, dig +short www.google.com, host ipv6.google.com, dig +short ipv6.google.com, host www.facebook.com, dig +short www.facebook.com. – jfgagne Sep 21 '11 at 15:21
+1 for using a real "scriptable" command (dig +short) which only ouputs the IP address without that chatty human output "X has address Y"... – Totor Mar 26 at 22:43
up vote 10 down vote

The following command using dig allows you to read the result directly without any sed/awk/etc. magic:

$ dig +short unix.stackexchange.com
64.34.119.12

dig is also included in the dnsutils package.

Note: dig has a return value of 0, even if the name could not be resolved. Thus, you'd need to check if the output is empty instead of checking the return value:

hostname=unix.stackexchange.com

ip=`dig +short $hostname`

if [ -n "$ip" ]; then
    echo IP: $ip
else
    echo Could not resolve hostname.
fi

Note 2: If a hostname has multiple IP addresses (try debian.org, for example), all of them will be returned. This "problem" affects all of the tools mentioned in this question so far:

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up vote 8 down vote

I have a tool on my machine that seems to do the job. The man page shows it seems to come with mysql... Here is how you could use it:

resolveip -s unix.stackexchange.com
64.34.119.12

The return value of this tool is different from 0 if the hostname cannot be resolved :

resolveip -s unix.stackexchange.coma
resolveip: Unable to find hostid for 'unix.stackexchange.coma': host not found
exit 2

UPDATE On fedora, it comes with mysql-server :

yum provides "*/resolveip"
mysql-server-5.5.10-2.fc15.x86_64 : The MySQL server and related files
Dépôt         : fedora
Correspondance depuis :
Nom de fichier      : /usr/bin/resolveip

I guess it would create a strange dependency for your script...

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1  
This seems to be the only solution on here that uses the OS's build in resolver - so works for /etc/hosts as well as DNS. – Gavin Brock Jul 2 '12 at 8:57
Great, just what I needed - something that pays attention to /etc/hosts. – Xiong Chiamiov Feb 23 at 3:21
up vote 7 down vote

The solutions given so far mostly work in the simpler case: the hostname directly resolves to a single ip address. This might be the only case where you need to resolve hostnames, but if not, bellow is a discussion on some cases that you might need to handle.

Chris Down and Heinzi shortly discussed the case where the hostname resovles to more than one ip addresses. In this case (and others bellow), basic scripting under the assumption that a hostname directly resolves to a single ip address may break. Bellow an example with a hostname resolving to more than a single ip address:

$ host www.l.google.com
www.l.google.com has address 209.85.148.147
www.l.google.com has address 209.85.148.103
www.l.google.com has address 209.85.148.99
www.l.google.com has address 209.85.148.106
www.l.google.com has address 209.85.148.105
www.l.google.com has address 209.85.148.104

But what is www.l.google.com? This is where the alias case need to be introduces. Lets check the example bellow:

$ host www.google.com
www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com.
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.39.103
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.39.147
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.39.105
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.39.99
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.39.106
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.39.104

So www.google.com does not directly resolve to ip addresses, but to an alias that itself resolves to a ip addresses. For more information on aliases, check here. Of course, the case where an alias has a single ip address is possible as shown bellow:

$ host g.www.ms.akadns.net
g.www.ms.akadns.net is an alias for lb1.www.ms.akadns.net.
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.19.190

But can aliases be chained ? The answer is yes:

$ host www.microsoft.com
www.microsoft.com is an alias for toggle.www.ms.akadns.net.
toggle.www.ms.akadns.net is an alias for g.www.ms.akadns.net.
g.www.ms.akadns.net is an alias for lb1.www.ms.akadns.net.
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has address 207.46.19.254

$ host www.google.fr
www.google.fr is an alias for www.google.com.
www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com.
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.39.147
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.39.103
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.39.99
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.39.106
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.39.104
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.39.105

I did not find any example where a hostname resolves to an alias that does not resolve to an ip address, but I think the case might occur.

More than multiples ip addresses and aliases, is there some other special cases... what about ipv6 ? You could try:

$ host ipv6.google.com
ipv6.google.com is an alias for ipv6.l.google.com.
ipv6.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1450:8007::68

Where the hostname ipv6.google.com is an ipv6 only hostname. What about dual stack hostnames:

$ host www.facebook.com
www.facebook.com has address 66.220.153.15
www.facebook.com has IPv6 address 2620:0:1c08:4000:face:b00c::

Again about ipv6, if your host is ipv4 only, you can still resolve ipv6 addresses (tested on a ipv4 only WinXP and with ipv6.google.com, you could try it on Linux). In this case, the resolution succeeds, but a ping fails with an unknown host error message. This might be a case where your scripting fails.

I hope those remarks were usefull.

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What a great complement to the accepted answer, showing all the edge cases that one might want to deal with in scripting. My version host does not even state "has address" for my boxes. – Mihai Danila Feb 15 at 23:23
up vote 4 down vote

To avoid the problem with aliases and always get a single IP address ready for use:

python -c 'import socket; print socket.gethostbyname("www.example.com")'
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up vote 3 down vote 
ping -q -c 1 -t 1 your_host_here | grep PING | sed -e "s/.*(//" | sed -e "s/).*//"

works without dependencies on other systems (and for hosts specified in /etc/hosts)

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The use of ping is what I needed as I need the value from the hosts file but the sed pattern parsing correctly but this worked ping -q -c 1 -t 1 your_host_here | grep PING | sed -e "s/^[^(]*[(]//" | sed -e "s/[)].*$//" – ManiacZX Jan 18 at 19:23
up vote 2 down vote

You could use host:

hostname=example.org

# strips the IP
IP=$( host ${hostname} | sed -e "s/.*\ //" )

# checks for errors
if [ $? -ne 0 ] ; then
   echo "Error: cannot resolve ${hostname}" 1>&2
   exit 1;
fi
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I'm not sure, but my host does return an error code (1) for unknown domains, and it says: "Host asdf not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)". – phunehehe Sep 15 '11 at 15:10
Indeed it does, sorry. I'll update – Matteo Sep 15 '11 at 15:38
2  
$HOSTNAME should be $hostname -- by convention, we capitalize environment variables (PAGER, EDITOR, SHELL, ...) and internal shell variables (BASH_VERSION, RANDOM, ...). All other variable names should contain at least one lowercase letter. This convention avoids accidentally overriding environmental and internal variables. – Chris Down Sep 15 '11 at 16:23
@Chris: thanks, edited – Matteo Sep 15 '11 at 17:46

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