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

DouglasJose
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8 Answers8

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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.

Bruno Bieri
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Ward - Reinstate Monica
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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.

Moose
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    Not working when connected through the open vpn – Alexander.Iljushkin Apr 05 '16 at 06:13
  • @Flextra - you will need SMB access to the machine. Your VPN may be blocking it. – Moose Apr 07 '16 at 02:55
  • 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 06 '17 at 21:12
  • Works for me. Just what I needed! – FearlessFuture Apr 12 '18 at 14:13
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    I keep getting `Host not found.` any idea why? – Shayan Nov 24 '19 at 19:22
  • I think it doesn't work on Windows 10, I keep getting, `Host not found.`. – Shayan Nov 24 '19 at 19:23
  • It does work on Windows 10, but on the target machine, the windows 10 firewall must not be blocking smb, and the Server service must be running to get the <20h> record. – Moose Nov 25 '19 at 20:36
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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...........
Marko Carter
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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
Kyle Brandt
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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.

Marcello Miorelli
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squillman
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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.
JimNim
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script'n'code
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psexec \192.168.0.65 hostname

DMHD006 hostname exited on 192.168.0.65 with error code 0.

Sahin
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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

user422366
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