Why do domain names sometimes end with a dot?

This also explains why there’s a . at the end of example.com. – zone files require a trailing dot at the end of a domain name (because otherwise they’re interpreted as being relative to the zone). So dig does too.

I really wish dig had a +human flag that printed out all of this information in a more human readable way, but for now I’m too lazy to put in the work to actually contribute code to do that (and I’m a pretty bad C programmer) so I’ll just complain about it on my blog instead :)

»Julia Evans →