Portable way to resolve host name to IP address - shell

Question

I need to resolve a host name to an IP address in a shell script. The code must work at least in Cygwin, Ubuntu and OpenWrt(busybox).
It can be assumed that each host will have only one IP address.
Example:
input
google.com
output
216.58.209.46
EDIT:
nslookup may seem like a good solution, but its output is quite unpredictable and difficult to filter. Here is the result command on my computer (Cygwin):
>nslookup google.com
Unauthorized answer:
Serwer: UnKnown
Address: fdc9:d7b9:6c62::1
Name: google.com
Addresses: 2a00:1450:401b:800::200e
216.58.209.78

Answer 1

I've no experience with OpenWRT or Busybox but the following one-liner will should work with a base installation of Cygwin or Ubuntu:
ipaddress=$(LC_ALL=C nslookup $host 2>/dev/null | sed -nr '/Name/,+1s|Address(es)?: *||p')
The above works with both the Ubuntu and Windows version of nslookup. However, it only works when the DNS server replies with one IP (v4 or v6) address; if more than one address is returned the first one will be used.
Explanation
LC_ALL=C nslookup sets the LC_ALL environment variable when running the nslookup command so that the command ignores the current system locale and print its output in the command’s default language (English).
The 2>/dev/null avoids having warnings from the Windows version of nslookup about non-authoritative servers being printed.
The sed command looks for the line containing Name and then prints the following line after stripping the phrase Addresses: when there's more than one IP (v4 or 6) address -- or Address: when only one address is returned by the name server.
The -n option means lines aren't printed unless there's a p commandwhile the-r` option means extended regular expressions are used (GNU sed is the default for Cygwin and Ubuntu).

Answer 2

If you want something available out-of-the-box on almost any modern UNIX, use Python:
pylookup() {
python -c 'import socket, sys; print socket.gethostbyname(sys.argv[1])' "$#" 2>/dev/null
}
address=$(pylookup google.com)
With respect to special-purpose tools, dig is far easier to work with than nslookup, and its short mode emits only literal answers -- in this case, IP addresses. To take only the first address, if more than one is found:
# this is a bash-specific idiom
read -r address < <(dig +short google.com | grep -E '^[0-9.]+$')
If you need to work with POSIX sh, or broken versions of bash (such as Git Bash, built with mingw, where process substitution doesn't work), then you might instead use:
address=$(dig +short google.com | grep -E '^[0-9.]+$' | head -n 1)
dig is available for cygwin in the bind-utils package; as bind is most widely used DNS server on UNIX, bind-utils (built from the same codebase) is available for almost all Unix-family operating systems as well.

Answer 3

Here's my variation that steals from earlier answers:
nslookup blueboard 2> /dev/null | awk '/Address/{a=$3}END{print a}'
This depends on nslookup returning matching lines that look like:
Address 1: 192.168.1.100 blueboard
...and only returns the last address.
Caveats: this doesn't handle non-matching hostnames at all.

Answer 4

TL;DR; Option 2 is my preferred choice for IPv4 address. Adjust the regex to get IPv6 and/or awk to get both. There is a slight edit to option 2 suggested use given in EDIT
Well a terribly late answer here, but I think I'll share my solution here, esp. because the accepted answer didn't work for me on openWRT(no python with minimal setup) and the other answer errors out "no address found after comma".
Option 1 (gives the last address from last entry sent by nameserver):
nslookup example.com 2>/dev/null | tail -2 | tail -1 | awk '{print $3}'
Pretty simple and straight forward and doesn't really need an explanation of piped commands.
Although, in my tests this always gave IPv4 address (because IPv4 was always last line, at least in my tests.) However, I read about the unexpected behavior of nslookup. So, I had to find a way to make sure I get IPv4 even if the order was reversed - thanks regex
Option 2 (makes sure you get IPv4):
nslookup example.com 2>/dev/null | sed 's/[^0-9. ]//g' | tail -n 1 | awk -F " " '{print $2}'
Explanation:
nslookup example.com 2>/dev/null - look up given host and ignore STDERR (2>/dev/null)
sed 's/[^0-9. ]//g' - regex to get IPv4 (numbers and dots, read about 's' command here)
tail -n 1 - get last 1 line (alt, tail -1)
awk -F " " '{print $2} - Captures and prints the second part of line using " " as a field separator
EDIT: A slight modification based on a comment to make it actually more generalized:
nslookup example.com 2>/dev/null | printf "%s" "$(sed 's/[^0-9. ]//g')" | tail -n 1 | printf "%s" "$(awk -F " " '{print $1}')"
In the above edit, I'm using printf command substitution to take care of any unwanted trailing newlines.