dog

dog is an open-source command-line DNS client published by Benjamin Sago that enables network administrators, developers, and security researchers to perform DNS lookups directly from the terminal. Designed for users who prefer text-based workflows, the tool displays query results in a colourful, human-readable format while also offering machine-friendly JSON output for integration with scripts and monitoring systems. Beyond traditional UDP queries, dog supports modern privacy-focused transport protocols: DNS-over-TLS (DoT) and DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH), allowing encrypted resolution against public resolvers such as Cloudflare, Quad9, or Google without exposing traffic to on-path eavesdropping. Common use cases include troubleshooting propagation delays, verifying record changes, auditing resolver behaviour, and automating domain checks within CI pipelines. The utility’s concise syntax makes it suitable for quick interactive probes as well as batch operations across large domain lists, while its coloured response highlighting helps operators spot anomalies like unexpected A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT, or SOA records at a glance. Released in a single stable version 0.1.0, dog remains lightweight and dependency-free, compiling on any platform that supports Rust, but Windows users can obtain ready-to-run binaries through the Network & Internet > Network Utilities category of the software catalogue. Despite its early version number, the client already implements EDNS(0), TCP fallback, and recursive query flags, providing a feature set comparable to long-standing dig while adding contemporary encryption and formatting options. The software is available for free on get.nero.com, with downloads provided via trusted Windows package sources such as winget, always delivering the latest version, and supporting batch installation of multiple applications.

Tags: