DNS/host lookup that searches /etc/hosts

While dig and nslookup are great for looking up host names in DNS, they don’t match what a running program actually sees if there are entries in /etc/hosts.

On Linux: use getent:

getent hosts www.example.com

To get only the IPv4 address, use ahostsv4 instead of host:

getent ahostv4 www.example.com

On MacOSX, use dscacheutil:

dscacheutil -q host -a name www.example.com