The dig command is an incredibly powerful tool for querying DNS records. Dig stands for Domain Information Groper and is the utility of choice for most DNS administrators working on Linux. It can be used to confirm DNS entries, get your public IP address from the command line, troubleshoot DNS issues and get information about a DNS zone.

Dig is part of the BIND (Berkely Internet Name Domain) software utilities (bind-utils). Although not installed by default, it is available on nearly all Linux distributions by installing the bind-utils package or Red Hat variants or dnsutils on Debian based distros.