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I'm looking for a command line tool which gets an IP address and returns the host name, for Windows.

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9 Answers 9

Reset to default
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The command you are looking for is called nslookup, works fine for reverse lookups IFF someone has configured a reverse zone file, which they don't always do.

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if all the above fails, and you are specifically looking for a Windows machine, you can use

nbtstat -a 192.168.1.50

The data returned will be all the NetBIOS records the machine has. The one with a <20h> record type will usually be the machine's name.

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    Not working when connected through the open vpn
    – Alexander.Iljushkin
    Apr 5, 2016 at 6:13
  • @Flextra - you will need SMB access to the machine. Your VPN may be blocking it.
    – Moose
    Apr 7, 2016 at 2:55
  • Interesting, looks like it tacks on the fully qualified domain name in the formatting: Pinging NETBIOSNAME.DOMAINNAME.com [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]. If its on the network and not on the domain (for me a unix system of interest) then ping -a just formats with the ipaddress alone it looks like.
    – jxramos
    Feb 6, 2017 at 21:12
  • Works for me. Just what I needed!
    – FearlessFuture
    Apr 12, 2018 at 14:13
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    I keep getting Host not found. any idea why?
    – Shayan
    Nov 24, 2019 at 19:22
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For many IP addresses you could just use ping -a, for example

ping -a 209.85.229.106

will return

Pinging ww-in-f106.google.com [209.85.229.106] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 209.85.229.106...........
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    This is what I always use first as it is universally available on pretty much every machine.
    – Goyuix
    Oct 13, 2009 at 14:54
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    ping is sooo often used to do simple DNS lookups... sigh don't do that.
    – PEra
    Oct 13, 2009 at 16:48
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    this is the only answer that got me the hostname from my raspberry in my LAN. @PEra why is this a bad answer?
    – andy
    Sep 18, 2019 at 20:52
  • How does this works? Though which protocol?
    – BAKE ZQ
    May 16, 2020 at 11:57
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If you use nslookup command with the IP address as its first argument will return the PTR record (the reverse entry) if it exists. For example:

nslookup 192.168.1.50
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(tested under Windows 10 x64)

From command line:

FOR /F "tokens=2 delims= " %A in ('2^>NUL NSLOOKUP "%IP_ADDRESS%" ^| FINDSTR /C:": "') do ECHO %A

Within a script:

FOR /F "tokens=2 delims= " %%A in ('2^>NUL NSLOOKUP "%IP_ADDRESS%" ^| FINDSTR /C:": "') do ECHO %%A

Two (side)notes:

  • To supress NSLOOKUP errors you have to use 2^>NUL instead of 1^>NUL
  • I've used FINDSTR /C to extract the value after the four whitespace characters. As the four spaces only seem to exist for the Name: entry, this appears to be only way to make it work on other localized systems.
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Use dig. A Windows port is available from the ISC here (look in the immediate download box for the link to the zip file). Here's their man page reference for dig.

Ward's point about the reverse lookup records often not getting created is very much true. Reverse lookups often do fail because many admins don't bother creating the ptr records.

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tracert might be an option.

tracert 10.12.190.51

Results in:

Tracing route to LAP8662.aus.int.example.com [10.12.190.51]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  LAP8662.aus.int.example.com [10.12.190.51]

Trace complete.
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  • This just uses the reverse DNS, it is exactly the same as using nslookup. But in this case the name resolution is a side effect and you shouldn't rely on it.
    – Nikita Kipriyanov
    Dec 7, 2022 at 5:22
  • Thanks Nikita. The curious thing is that sometimes tracert returns the resolved name, but nslookup doesn't. It must be some peculiarity about my network setup.
    – Fidel
    Dec 7, 2022 at 6:52
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    This is the statement I wouldn't believe unless I see it myself ;) The explanation must be that nslookup uses only DNS protocol, but tracert uses the system name resolution library which uses DNS as a last resort, after WINS, NetBIOS, hosts file and so on were tried; however, in your example the name looks like DNS name. Anyway, I wouldn't rely on the results that all those "automatic" methods produce.
    – Nikita Kipriyanov
    Dec 7, 2022 at 7:41
  • Very interesting! Thanks Nikita
    – Fidel
    Dec 7, 2022 at 12:42
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if you want to know the host-name in same network then please use another machine which have same network and use below commend
Ping -an ip addres

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    Didn't you notice this answer was already here? – and it's not designed for this.
    – Esa Jokinen
    Jun 28, 2017 at 5:36
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psexec \192.168.0.65 hostname

DMHD006 hostname exited on 192.168.0.65 with error code 0.

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    Keep in mind that the configured hostname not necessarily matches the hostname that is configured in DNS.
    – Gerald Schneider
    Jul 25, 2019 at 8:44

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