66

I would like to know if it's possible to get IPv4 and IPv6 addresses with just one invocation of dig?

For example, this gives the IPv4 address:

dig hostname A

And this command will give me the IPv6 address:

dig hostname AAAA

How can I get both addresses, IPv4 and IPv6, with just one command?

Matthias Braun
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user3645265
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3 Answers3

94

It may be that this has been added to dig since the question was asked, but for completeness this can be accomplished through the following query:

dig hostname A hostname AAAA +short

Source: http://linux.die.net/man/1/dig -- under the 'Multiple Queries' section

user3166580
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56

If you're querying an authoritative server for the domain, you can get all the records for a name with an ANY query:

dig hostname ANY @servername

However, this won't work reliably if you're querying a caching server. When a caching server responds to an ANY query, it returns whatever records happen to be in cache at the time. If the name has both A and AAAA records, but the server has only looked up the A records recently, the AAAA records won't be in the cache, so it won't return them.

Furthermore, there is a proposal to allow DNS servers to refuse to answer ANY queries: Providing Minimal-Sized Responses to DNS Queries that have QTYPE=ANY. If you query a server that implements this, you may not be able to get both responses with a single query (although one of the suggestions in that draft is that an ANY query might just return all MX, A, and AAAA, since this is often what clients want). So for best reliability, you should just make two queries.

Barmar
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  • There's another to way get both address without using dig command? – user3645265 May 18 '14 at 15:07
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    You can use the `host` command. By default it does `A`, `AAAA`, and `MX` queries. – Barmar May 19 '14 at 02:15
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    note that `ANY` is discouraged. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-dnsop-refuse-any/?include_text=1 and https://blog.cloudflare.com/deprecating-dns-any-meta-query-type/ – the8472 Nov 04 '16 at 14:56
6

Now that IPv6 is a lot more common, I've found myself frequently needing to query both A and AAAA. I can never seem to remember the syntax, so I finally wrote a function for my ~/.bashrc called digall. I shared it with some friends and they loved it, so I threw it up on github in gist that anyone is welcome to use: https://gist.github.com/FreedomBen/23020c464779bb30cab754d92bdce6c6

Here's the current version which you can put in a file in your path and mark executable:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

#
# To use, simply run `digall <domain>` such as:
#
#   digall example.com
#   digall sub.example.com
#
# Place this file in your PATH.  Suggest either /usr/local/bin/ or ~/bin
#
# Alternatively you can wrap it in a function called `digall` and put in ~/.bashrc
#

# License:  MIT

declare -rx digall_color_restore='\033[0m'
declare -rx digall_color_red='\033[0;31m'
declare -rx digall_color_light_green='\033[1;32m'
declare -rx digall_color_light_blue='\033[1;34m'
declare -rx digall_color_light_cyan='\033[1;36m'

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
  echo -e "${digall_color_red}Error: Please pass domain as first arg${digall_color_restore}"
else
  echo -e "${digall_color_light_blue}Queries: (dig +noall +answer '$1' '<type>')...${digall_color_light_cyan}\n"

  for t in SOA NS SPF TXT MX AAAA A; do
    echo -e "${digall_color_light_green}Querying for $t records...${digall_color_restore}${digall_color_light_cyan}"
    dig +noall +answer "$1" "${t}"
    echo -e "${digall_color_restore}"
  done
fi
Freedom_Ben
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