The disgusting and useless nslookup (was Re: using in.named and named.boot on BIND V8)

[Kevin Darcy]

So why don't they just put an option (-uglyandbroken?) into "dig" to make it
behave like nslookup? I know this would probably offend the purists, but the
value of it would be that then all of the folks who have scripts which rely on
nslookup would only have to make a *minimal* set of changes initially, i.e.
just the command-line invocations.

I think getting rid of nslookup as a separate executable would be a big step
towards getting rid of it altogether.


- Kevin

Jim Reid wrote:

> >>>>> "Brad" == Brad Knowles <brad.knowles at skynet.be> writes:
>
>     Brad>       I have to assume that it is for reasons like this that
>     Brad> "nslookup" is completely gone from more recent versions of
>     Brad> BIND.  Good riddance!
>
> It is still there alas. IIRC the BIND9 developers did discuss dropping
> nslookup for BIND9 but were obliged to provide it, possibly for
> contractual reasons. There are a lot of legacy scripts in use that
> depend on this dismal tool unfortunately. So nslookup lives on. At
> least the BIND9 version of nslookup prints a nice little message
> telling you to use a decent lookup tool instead:
>
>     % nslookup
>     Note:  nslookup is deprecated and may be removed from future releases.
>     Consider using the `dig' or `host' programs instead.  Run nslookup with
>     the `-sil[ent]' option to prevent this message from appearing.
>
> nslookup is like something from a Dracula horror film. It's not alive,
> but it's not dead either. But it keeps coming back to haunt you. And
> everyone's bored with it and wishes it went away forever. :-)