Nslookup on The Mac, Interactive Mode Broken

Nslookup under osx is tricky to use interactively as it doesn’t support readline. When you try to use the command history you get the following:

> ^[[A
Argh! This means more typing. As far as I can remember it has always returned ^[[A or ^[[B depending on the arrow key used. After a bit of research it seems you can fix it with rlwrap which you can install via mac ports. To use it just wrapper nslookup in rlwrap:
rlwrap nslookup
This should enable the history in nslookup and reduce the amount of typing, when you need to go back. For ease set up an alias in your .bash_profile:
alias ns=“rlwrap nslookup”
Now typing ns gives you an interactive ready nslookup. Clearly, you could use dig or host but some habits are hard to shake.

os x

135 Words

2013-04-25 00:00 +0000