Open Radar

 
Summary:
The manpages for 'host' and 'dig' correctly point out that most OS X tools have a different lookup behavior:

Mac OS X NOTICE
       The host command does not use the host name and address resolution or
       the DNS query routing mechanisms used by other processes running on Mac
       OS X.  The results of name or address queries printed by host may
       differ from those found by other processes that use the Mac OS X native
       name and address resolution mechanisms.  The results of DNS queries may
       also differ from queries that use the Mac OS X DNS routing library.

However, it's not clear from this description how to work around this.

To get roughly the expected results from 'host example.com', 'dscacheutil -q host -a name example.com' appears to be a suitable substitute.

The manpages should be amended to point to dscacheutil's -q host feature, and ideally, there should be a shortcut for a simpler syntax; as a workaround, I use this alias:

alias osxhost "dscacheutil -q host -a name"

Steps to Reproduce:
1. look up example.com using 'host'
2. notice discrepancy between 'host' and e.g. Safari
3. notice that 'host' manpage points this out

Expected Results:
The manpage helpfully shows me the command I probably meant to use, which is dscacheutil -q host -a.

Actual Results:
The manpage doesn't provide a resolution.

Version:
10.11.2 Beta (15C48a)

Notes:
The dscacheutil manpage is lacking in examples; there's not a single host lookup example.