resolver environment variables

[Greg Chavez]

On 3/14/06, David Carmean <dlc-bu at halibut.com> wrote:
>
> Do the environment variables LOCALDOMAIN, RES_OPTIONS, and friends
> actually work on any common/modern OS package?  I have so far been
> unsuccessful in using RES_OPTIONS or LOCALDOMAIN in FreeBSD (4.x and 5.4),
> Solaris (2.8, 2.9), and Linux (RedHat 8).

I only have Solaris (8/9/10) servers to play with, but according to
the manpage for resolver(4):

     The current domain name
     is defined by the hostname if not specified in the configuration file; it
     can be overridden by the environment variable LOCALDOMAIN. This environ-
     ment variable may contain several blank-separated tokens if you wish to
     override the ``search list'' on a per-process basis.  This is similar to
     the search command in the configuration file.  Another environment vari-
     able (``RES_OPTIONS'') can be set to override certain internal resolver
     options which are otherwise set by changing fields in the statp / _res
     structure or are inherited from the configuration file's options command.
     The syntax of the ``RES_OPTIONS'' environment variable is explained in
     resolver(5).  Initialization normally occurs on the first call to one of
     the other resolver routines.

I would imagine that only OS resolver routines would be able to use
these variables, as opposed to tools like nslookup and dig.  Why the
aversion to using resolv.conf?  Just want to use these variables for
the halibut?

--
--Greg Chavez
--