An alternative to installing bind bloat just to get dig
Sometime you don’t realise just how often you use a tool until it is no longer there. Such is the case with dig on my new Raspbian install. Sure, I could apt-get install dnsutils and dig will be there. But that also installs bind9-host, libbind9, libdns, libisc, libisccc, libisccfg, and liblwres. Which means “2,809 kB of additional disk space will be used.” All that for a small single purpose command? That seems overkill. So some googlefu later and I discovered the drill utility. On Debian based systems, run apt-get install ldnsutils which uses 738 kB of disk space. And now you can type drill example.com A or just alias dig="drill" and never have to remember to use drill instead of dig. Well, there are a few differences (such as no “+short”), but for most of the dig syntax it works fine.