Clean dig for CSV (coherent/consistent) parsing

dig-clean.md

Problem

dig sometimes uses double tabs which is only good for visually viewing lookups of short to medium-length hostnames, but it is bad for reusing the values as in parsing them like a CSV file into a table.

Solution

To prevent the double use of tabs, you can pipe as follows:

dig <host> | sed --quiet 's/[\t ]\+/\t/gp'

Explanation

pipe/forward it to sed and let it replace one or more (greedy) tab or space with a single tab

Thoroughly:

--quiet only output the result
' beginning of script
s  command "substitute"
/ seperator
[\t ]\+  replace one or more (greedy) (the plus char is an escaped quantifier) tab or space
/ seperator
\t with a single tab character
/ seperator
gp  "global (search through every line)" and "print lines" flag
' end of script

Thanks to:

• http://anaturb.net/sed.htm
• https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-use-sed-to-find-and-replace-text-in-files-in-linux-unix-shell/

~/.bashrc function/alias

function digc() #dig-clean
{
  dig "$@" | sed --quiet 's/[\t ]\+/\t/gp'
}

Explanation: pass all arguments (i.e. whatever follows after digc) to usual dig, pipe it as described above