HOWTO Install dig on Windows 7

Posted on by


The short version:

  1. Create a folder for the dig application (I used E:\apps\dig)
  2. Download the latest version of BIND from the Internet Systems Consortium website.
  3. Open the .zip archive and extract dig.* and *.dll into your application folder
  4. Add the application folder to your path
  5. Double-click vcredist_x86.exe to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable (you may not need to do this if you’re sure it’s already installed)

All of these steps might need a little more explanation for an inexperienced person. But then if you’re an inexperienced person, why do you need dig? Happy to expand on any of the above steps if you wish – just add a comment here.


2 thoughts on “HOWTO Install dig on Windows 7”

  1. Is it possible to utilize .digrc in Windows? I’ve tried of few of the standard locations, but I don’t see that dig is reading the file.

    * %userprofile%
    * %localappdata%
    * Dig’s install directory

    Reply ↓

    • Not tried it myself, but here’s a suggestion:

      1. Create a file called “.digrc” and notice that it starts with a period and does not have an extension. Just to keep track of things, I put it in the same folder as I’ve got the DIG files which was, recall, C:DIG.
      2. Edit it as you’d edit any text file — Notepad works fine — and put an options on a line by themselves. To try it out, just put “+short” on a line by itself in .digrc.
      3. Tell DIG where to find .digrc by creating another environment variable, “home,” and point it to the folder containing .digrc, as in “set home=c:dig” to point it (obviously) to the C:DIG folder.

      – from http://www.minasi.com/newsletters/nws1111b.htm

      Reply ↓