Thursday, February 26, 2009

How to Install dig for Windows

dig is the standard tool for advanced DNS queries. A Windows version is available as part of the BIND port. To install it on Windows:
2) Download BIND9.5.0-P2.zip
3) Open the archive with WinZip
4) Extract dig.exe and *.dll to c:\windows\system32
5) If you want the documentation page, extract dig.html to somewhere that you can find it.
Now you will be able to use dig from your command prompt in Windows. It is faster and more sophisticated than nslookup.
Get the quick help options with "dig -h".

16 comments:

Adam said...

Thanks! This is exactly what I was looking for; I was getting tired of having to switch to another OS just to use dig.

Lance Lakey said...

What Adam said. Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Started with cygwin first then decided to google it and found you! Thank you!

Rajesh Narkhed said...

Thank you very much .. dig on windows was what I was looking for testing my DNS implementation.

AnRkey said...

Awesome, thanks for the tip!

Anonymous said...

Thanks, works exactly as you instructed.

Laebshade said...

I know this is an old post, but just wanted to post that not all the dll files are needed; only:

libbind9.dll
libdns.dll
libisc.dll
libisccfg.dll
liblwres.dll

are.

Mutuelle sante said...

Thanks a ton it is a good support, now to install dig for windows is definitely simple and easy with the help of your recommendation. Thank you

aaronnewton said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
aaronnewton said...

Cheers - this works nicely.

My only comment would be for users to create a folder like c:\users\username\scripts and copy the program there instead, as this is a bit easier to track than copying it to the default Windows path. You would need to add the above path to your Windows path variable.

Unknown said...

First and foremost congratulations to these remarks, just as lucid and informative. However, 2 or 3 points would have deserved more development, especially in the conclusion. It's just a way to say I'm eager to discover the next post

Justin Goldberg said...

The latest release of BIND9 (and DiG) for windows appears to be 9.9.3P2, but this might be pointless, as the DiG code hasn't changed since 2011 as version 1.284. You can also copy the man.1 page from here[1] to Cygwin root directory\usr\man\man1 (it's on a mirror site but not on ftp.isc.org for some reason)

[1] http://isc.mirrors.pair.com/bind9/9.9.0rc1/bind-9.9.0rc1/bin/dig/

Unknown said...

If anyone's running windows 8.1, same process works, just copy the files to %ROOT%\Windows\SysWOW64

Anonymous said...

same thing for Windows 7

Anonymous said...

Yes, copy the files to the SysWOW64 folder, when I only copied the files to Windows\System32 I got an error saying the libisc.dll library was not found when I ran the command "dig -h". Thanks to James for the info.

Unknown said...

it is not working for me

Error:- The program can't start because libisc.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.