I occassionally use the dig command-line utility to look up something related to some DNS record, but I have always found its default output to be a little too verbose for me.
Here's an example of the default output for looking up the domain for this site:
$ dig martin.frost.ws
; <<>> DiG 9.20.30-1-Debian <<>> martin.frost.ws +all
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 64531
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;martin.frost.ws. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
martin.frost.ws. 2174 IN CNAME kur.frost.ws.
kur.frost.ws. 2174 IN A 65.108.60.197
;; Query time: 7 msec
;; SERVER: 10.11.12.53#53(10.11.12.53) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Sat Nov 07 22:42:20 CET 2026
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 86
After living with this since I learned about the existence of dig, which is probably closer to 20 years by now, I finally dug around enough in man dig to realize it's possible to create your own set of default options, and put that in a config file, ~/.digrc.
So, just now, I ran echo "+noall +answer" > ~/.digrc, and now the output of the same command contains just the stuff I want from it:
$ dig martin.frost.ws
martin.frost.ws. 2102 IN CNAME kur.frost.ws.
kur.frost.ws. 2102 IN A 65.108.60.197
And then, of course, I just need to mkrc ~/.digrc to put that file in my rcm-backed dotfiles repo.