finding authoritative nameservers

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <48316AF6.5030105 at gis.net>, 
Danny Mayer <mayer at gis.net> wrote:

>Since dig +trace already does this why bother to write your own unless 
>you just want to do it for your own edification?

Forking takes finite non-zero time & cycles.

I am writting an application that may perhaps become part of one or more
high volume MTA installations.

If performance matters, one does not want to be constantly forking dig
and/or parsing its verbose output.  rather, one would prefer to go to
the proverbial horse's mouth, i.e. by programatically calling primitives
directly in order to obtain the desired information, directly.