Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) Practice Exam 2025 – Your All-in-One Guide to Exam Success!

The command used to test a DNS query and report back the results in Unix-based systems is 'dig'. This command, which stands for "domain information groper," is specifically designed to retrieve DNS information, allowing users to query DNS records for a given domain. It provides a detailed output, showing various types of DNS records such as A, AAAA, MX, and TXT, among others.

'Dig' is favored by network administrators and security professionals because it offers more flexibility and provides additional options for troubleshooting and analyzing DNS issues compared to other commands. For instance, it can be tailored to perform specific types of queries or to query different DNS servers.

In contrast, while 'nslookup' is another command used for checking DNS information, it is generally less powerful and less versatile than 'dig'. The 'ping' command is primarily used to test network connectivity rather than to query DNS records, and 'traceroute' is intended for analyzing the path packets take through a network, making it unrelated to DNS queries.