Dig for Windows

Dig is a DNS utility normally found on a Unix/Linux platform.  Windows has the nslookup command, but a version of Dig is available for Windows.

To obtain a copy of Dig for the Windows platform, access http://www.isc.org/downloads and download the latest copy of BIND.  Once the .ZIP file is downloaded, extract the contents to a folder.  An executable should be present for Dig:

The other files besides dig.exe, dig.html, and the .DLL files can be deleted.  The basic syntax of dig.exe is:

@server name type

The server is the DNS server to query, the name is the domain, and the type is the DNS record to query.  For example, the command below would query the DNS server at 129.71.254.5 for the MX record for the domain wvnet.edu.

dig @129.71.254.5 wvnet.edu MX

Another example of a command would be:

dig www.yahoo.com ns @129.71.254.5

The command above would query the DNS server at the IP address of 129.71.254.5 and return all name server records for the domain name of www.yahoo.com.

The option +trace returns exactly what the DNS server is going as it performs the query in question.

More options can be viewed within the dig.html help file.