A lab virtual image is always named pc21.local and in variety of testing situation. The administrator wants to use the IP address pc21.local in a script but is concerned it may change from day to…

`+short` is also used for scripting, as it outputs only the RDATA, but `+norecurse +nocomments` might be preferred in some contexts for specific output parsing logic, or if the question implicitly seeks a specific level of detail in the DNS response.

The `dig` command performs DNS lookups to resolve hostnames to IP addresses. Using `$(dig pc21.local +norecurse +nocomments)` queries the DNS for `pc21.local`, and the `+norecurse` and `+nocomments` options help produce a cleaner output by suppressing comments and preventing recursive queries, making the response more suitable for parsing in a script to extract the IP address.

`+answer` and `+mostatus` are not standard `dig` command options for controlling output for scripting in this manner.

`+authority` only displays the authority section of the DNS response, which lists authoritative name servers, not the host's A record containing its IP address.