Besides the host command, you can also use the dig command to do DNS interrogation. The advantages of dig compared to host are its flexibility and clarity of output. With dig, you can ask the system to process a list of lookup requests from a file.

Let's use dig to interrogate the http://hackthissite.org domain.

Without providing any options besides the domain name, the dig command will only return the A record of a domain. To request any other DNS record type, we can provide the type option in the command line:

    # dig hackthissite.org
    ; <<>> DiG 9.9.5-9+deb8u5-Debian <<>> hackthissite.org
    ;; global options: +cmd
    ;; Got answer:
    ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 44321
    ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
    ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
    ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; MBZ: 0005 , udp: 4096
    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;hackthissite.org.    IN  A
    ;; ANSWER SECTION:
    hackthissite.org.  5  IN  A  198.148.81.139
    hackthissite.org.  5  IN  A  198.148.81.137
    hackthissite.org.  5  IN  A  198.148.81.138
    hackthissite.org.  5  IN  A  198.148.81.135
    hackthissite.org.  5  IN  A  198.148.81.136
    ;; Query time: 80 msec
    ;; SERVER: 172.16.43.2#53(172.16.43.2)
    ;; WHEN: Tue Feb 02 18:16:06 PST 2016
    ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 125
  

From the result, we can see that the dig output now returns the DNS records of A.