DNS Query Utils.

Two DNS query utilities are normally provided with linux distributions, namely 'nslookup' and 'host'. 'host' has an easier interface, IMHO.

'host' accepts the name of the domain for which to perform the query, the type of record(s) to query for, and the address of the DNS server to query.

Tip: when querying a fully qualified domain name, adding a '.' at the end tells the name lookup library not to try and append local domain suffixes. So use 'yahoo.com.' instead of 'yahoo.com'.