13.6. Tools

Let's wrap up loose ends. We told you about our tool to convert IP addresses to names so that your debugging output is easier to read. Here is such a tool written in Perl:

#!/usr/bin/perl -n

use "Socket";

if (/\b)(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)\b/) {
$addr = pack('C4', split(/\./, $1));
($name, $rest) = gethostbyaddr($addr, &AF_INET);
if($name) {s/$1/$name/};
}

print;

It's best not to pipe named.run output into this script with debugging on because the script will generate its own queries to the nameserver.