A poor mans CNAME using /etc/hosts

I did not want to set dnsmasq to setup a couple of CNAMEs. So I wrote the following little script to do the work. I run it at boot using root's crontab @reboot

 

You need to put a placeholder in /etc/hosts.

127.0.0.1 search.me

The bash script

lookup=search.me
ip=`dig google.com +short | grep '^[.0-9]*$'`
sed -i -r "s/([0-9]{1,3}\.){3}[0-9]{1,3}\s+$lookup/$ip $lookup/g"  /etc/hosts