getaddrinfo() from shell?

Question

When you call ping name.domain, it goes through both /etc/hosts and the DNS resolver to obtain an IP. It could be an IP hard-coded in /etc/hosts, or it could be one from the DNS server. It does so by calling getaddrinfo() or equivalent, not directly, of course.

How do I call getaddrinfo() from shell? How do I reproduce the effect of "normal" net utilities to obtain an IP from an address?

This is not about using dig/host which only go through DNS, or getent which only goes through hosts. I want to reproduce common application behavior (e.g. ping) when it receives a name it needs to resolve. There are other questions about dig/host. This question is not a duplicate of those.

Update: here are my findings (based partly on answers to other Qs)

• on Ubuntu (and Debian?) there is gethostip -d name.domain from syslinux.
• perl -MSocket -le 'print inet_ntoa inet_aton shift' name.domain works reliably and is terser than the accepted answer.
• Using getent may also work: getent ahostsv4 name.domain | grep STREAM | head -1 | cut -f1 -d' '

This seems to be the best one can do.

Answer 1

If you have access to Perl I rolled my own (well found it on the internet and used it):

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Socket;

$host = shift @ARGV;
die("usage: gethostbyname hostname\n") unless(defined($host));

$packed_ip = gethostbyname($host);

if (defined $packed_ip) {
    $ip_address = inet_ntoa($packed_ip);
    print "$ip_address\n";
    exit 0
} else {
    warn "$host not found\n";
    exit 1
}

This code comes from this SF Q&A titled: Linux command line utility to resolve host names using /etc/hosts first.

Examples

$ ./gethostbyname.pl skinner
192.168.1.3

$ ./gethostbyname.pl www.google.com
74.125.225.84

$ ./gethostbyname.pl localhost
127.0.0.1

I've used the above method when code was running on multiple Unix machines, not just Linux, and so getent wasn't an option.

getent

I know the man page for getent leaves you thinking that getent will only look in the file databases, but I believe it goes through whatever means are defined in /etc/nsswitch.conf. So if it states dns as a value there, then I believe it will interrogate the DNS server that's configured in /etc/resolv.conf. Assuming there is one defined in that file.

In my testing I do not have an entry in my file, /etc/hosts, for the host "skinner" and yet getent resolves it just fine via DNS.

$ getent hosts skinner
192.168.1.3     skinner.bubba.net

$ grep skinner /etc/hosts
$