Can I use Bonjour from command line?

Question

Is it possible to use Bonjour from command line? For example if I want to register a service I type something like that: bonjour -register service_name port. And then Bonjou

Answer 1

mDNS is an older version of the dns-sd tool. They are both command line tools, written by Apple, to interact with Bonjour.

You can use the command line tool to do a few things with Bonjour, but to quote from the dns-sd man page:

The dns-sd command is primarily intended for interactive use. Because its command-line arguments and output format are subject to change, invoking it from a shell script will generally be fragile.

If you wish to perform DNS Service Discovery operations from a scripting language, then the best way to do this is not to execute the dns-sd command and then attempt to decipher the textual output, but instead to directly call the DNS-SD APIs using a binding for your chosen language.

For example, if you are programming in Ruby, then you can directly call DNS-SD APIs using the dnssd package documented at http://rubyforge.org/projects/dnssd/. Similar bindings for other languages are also in development.

For example, you asked about "DNSServiceRegister", which is a C function:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Networking/Reference/DNSServiceDiscovery_CRef/dns_sd_h/index.html#//apple_ref/c/func/DNSServiceRegister