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Simple yet thorough hostname resolution in Mac OS X @ 02 Dec 2012

There are many CLI tools available to resolve IPs for domain names, such as dig and host. While these utilities generally perform DNS resolution, they do not typically consider hostnames defined in /etc/hosts.

Fortunately, in Mac OS X the tool dscacheutil can do this. I've defined a shell function in ~/.zshrc to make this simple:

ip() { dscacheutil -q host -a name ${1}; }

Note that this works for both DNS-resolvable hosts and those you've defined:

% ip curtisfree.com
name: curtisfree.com
ip_address: 66.40.52.181
% ip post-it # home server, named in /etc/hosts
name: post-it
ip_address: 192.168.0.2

This function will work in both ZSH and BASH, and it should be adaptable to your favorite shell.