Folks-

Kudos to kyle++ for a bunch of great ideas, particularly using inet_ntoa() - I had no idea...

Here's the answer to your question on why I need this...

The reason I need this is to run a command on remote machines, which needs the destination IP address (not the host name) in dotted notation, as a command line argument. The destination IP address is different for each remote machine, but is contained in either /etc/hosts, or in DNS, under a common host alias. My current solution is shown is this shell script fragment: 
DESTIP=`perl-one-liner("common_host_alias")`
remote_command -IP $DESTIP

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ikegami++ as always. I've learned something new again (but don't yet understand). I do understand why 

inet_ntoa(gethostbyname("www.google.com"))

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gives me a usage error, but I don't understand why adding the "". makes it work 
inet_ntoa("".gethostbyname("www.google.com"))

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Unless this is some new form of black magic, it seems that you're simply adding a null in front of that which is returned by gethostbyname(). Why would that have an effect?

Lastly, jwkrahn++ for pointing out the unix host(1) command. Unfortunately, the box I'm running this on does not have the command installed.

Thanks

-Craig

In reply to Re: gethostbyname one-liner: Improvements? by cmv
in thread gethostbyname one-liner: Improvements? by cmv

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