Dig (Domain Information Groper) is a network administration command-line tool for querying the Domain Name System (DNS) name servers.

In its simplest form, when used to query a single host (domain) without any additional options, the dig command is pretty verbose.

In the following example, we’re performing on the ilearnaws.com domain:

The Got answer section shows technical details about the answer received from the requested authority (DNS server). The header shows the opcode (the action performed by dig) and the status of the action. In this example, the status is NOERROR, which means that the requested authority served the query without any issue.

The QUESTION SECTION shows the query (question). By default, dig requests the A record.

The ANSWER SECTION provides us with an answer to our question. As we already mentioned, by default dig will request the A record. Here, we can see that the domain ilearnaws.com points to the 45.76.245.160 IP address.