A Tool Harness

I've written a homegrown tool that automates other command-line tools by using input data from a text file. My tool is a simple, one-line shell script that works on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X with just a few modifications.

How It Works
Let's say you run a firewall report of the top outgoing activity destinations by users of your network. Unfortunately, the firewall doesn't perform the IP address-to-name lookup function and instead simply gives you a list of IP addresses and the number of connections initiated for each address, similar to the information in Table 1.

This report would become much more interesting (and useful) if the IP addresses were resolved to domain names. Then it would reveal at a glance which users were visiting a portal, streaming music, accessing Web mail, or conducting other types of Internet-based activities.

Several common command-line tools such as Whois, dig, and Microsoft's NBTStat help you resolve IP addresses to their owners, DNS names, and Windows NetBIOS names, respectively. It's easy to run Whois for a single address. For example, typing

whois 66.102.7.99 

shows you who owns that IP address. The tool takes a few seconds to run and you need to scroll through the output to find the data you want. . . .