In addition to the great dig (pun intended) of the dscacheutil usage that's not covered by the man documentation, I'd like to add that at the core of the macOs name resolution system sits the mDNSresponder service, and it seems to be gathering all different sources of the lookup information under the common interface. I've looked at man pages for mDNSResponder, dns-sd, scutil, networksetup, and dscacheutil none of which seem to query dns. Is there a macOS command line utility to resolve addresses using the same heuristic that native mac apps use? Note: I am not interested in clearing the DNS cache, I'm interested in using the native macOS DNS resolver from a script. Using the macOS network reachability tool, I get a cached result as well (for those not familiar with the output the IP address is revealed in the last line): $ scutil -W -r Meanwhile using the macOS 'Network Utility' lookup returns a cached result: Here is an example of what I've encountered: $ dig +short ĭig shows that the DNS query returns a local address handled by our own DNS server. When testing DNS changes I sometimes see different results between the unix tools and native mac applications.

Given that, how do I query DNS in terminal and get the same results as native macOS apps?

The results of DNS queries may also differ from queries that use the macOS DNS routing library. I know how to query DNS using tools like dig, host, etc.

Resolve mac