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QNS(7) Miscellaneous Information Manual QNS(7) NAME qns - query name server SYNOPSIS qns [ -n server ] [ request ] DESCRIPTION Qns retrieves information from a database of naming information. It is used by rsh and rlogin (see dcon(1)) to translate names to internet ad- dresses and by mail(1) to route electronic mail. Entries in the database consist of one or more value,type pairs or sim- ple values. A simple value declares the name of some entity. An entry may contain no name or several, and different entries containing the same name need not refer to the same entity. These types are used: dk Value is a Datakit address. in Value is a numeric IP address. dom Value is an internet domain name. tel Value is a telephone number, possibly prefixed by a uucp Dial- codes name. org Value is an organization name. svc Value names a service. origin Value must be local, for sorting by `distance'; see below. The following entries describe an entity research with a Datakit ad- dress, an IP address and domain name, belonging to organization att, and offering the uucp service: 192.11.4.55,in research research.astro.nj.att.com.,dom att,org research nj/astro/research,dk uucp,svc att,org Qns prints database entries that match requests. If a request is sup- plied on the command line, qns prints the answer and exits; otherwise it reads and answers requests from the standard input until end-of- file. The possible requests are: set key... Print every entry matching all keys. value tlist key... Examine entries matching the keys until a pair with type tlist is found; print the matching value and stop. Tlist may be a single type, or several separated by reset Cause the name server to reinitialize its database. help Print a list of requests. quit Exit qns. A key is a value,type pair; an entry matches if it contains that pair. If ,type is omitted, any pair with the specified value will do. A * at the end of a value stands for an arbitrary suffix. When a database search returns several entries with dk or dom types, and the database contains an entry with the conventional pair lo- cal,origin, the entries are sorted by increasing `distance' from the dk or dom pairs in the local,origin entry. Datakit names in the same ex- change are nearer than names in different exchanges in the same area, which are nearer than names in different areas. Domain names matching to four levels of domain hierarchy are nearer than names matching to only three levels, and so on. Qns expects to reach the name server ns(8); option -n points it at ser- vice server instead. SEE ALSO ipc(3), ns(8) QNS(7)