Why do domain names sometimes end with a dot?

Hello! When I was writing the zine How DNS Works earlier this year, someone asked me – why do people sometimes put a dot at the end of a domain name? For example, if you look up the IP for example.com by running dig example.com, you’ll see this: $ dig example.com example.com. 5678 IN A 93.184.216.34 dig has put a . to the end of example.com – now it’s example.com.! What’s up with that? Also, some DNS tools require domains to have a "." at the end: if you try to pass example.com to miekg/dns, l...

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