[CALUG] /etc/hosts not used?

[Jim Sansing]

I haven't seen in this thread what you intend to use it for, so I
don't know how much help this will be, but ping does what you
want.  If you just need a simple command line utility, you could
get one response and cut the hostname:

  ping -c 1 -W 1 <ip_addr> | cut -f2,3 -d' ' | head -1

If you need it in an application, grab the ping source code and
see what they are doing (from the hosts man page, it looks like
the resolver system call and I don't know if Perl has that function).

Later . . .   Jim


Eldon Ziegler wrote:
>The perl statement printed foo, not the IP address. You're right that 
>what I want is some shell command ("host" or not) that will first 
>look in /etc/hosts and then use DNS to find an IP address.
>
>At 01:35 pm 3/18/2006, Jim Bauer wrote:
>  
>>On Saturday 18 March 2006 07:12, Eldon Ziegler wrote:
>>    
>>>I need a local host name to IP address association to override that
>>>provided by DNS. However, after entering the new definition in
>>>/etc/hosts the "host" command still returns the IP address from DNS.
>>>I've tried in on Linux 2.6 (RedHat ES4) and 2.4 (RedHat 9.x).
>>>
>>>/etc/host.conf has "order hosts,bind". /etc/nsswitch.conf has "hosts:
>>>files dns". Does some service need to be restarted? How do I get
>>>/etc/hosts to override DNS?
>>>      
>>I am fairly certain the host command only does DNS lookups.
>>So it'll never look in /etc/hosts.
>>
>>I think you really want to know what does the gethostbyname() library
>>routine will return?  Try this to find out (replacing 'foo' with what
>>you want to lookup).
>>
>>perl -e '($x) = gethostbyname("foo"); print $x, "\n"'
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Columbia, Maryland Linux User's Group (CALUG) mailing list
>>CALUG Website: http://www.calug.com
>>Email postings to: lug at calug.com
>>Change your list subscription options: http://calug.com/mailman/listinfo/lug
>>    
>
>_______________________________________________
>Columbia, Maryland Linux User's Group (CALUG) mailing list
>CALUG Website: http://www.calug.com
>Email postings to: lug at calug.com
>Change your list subscription options: http://calug.com/mailman/listinfo/lug
>
>