axfr does zone transfer from a remote dns server zonefresh.rc is a script that tries to format axfr's output nicely as a plan9 NDB file to sttandard output. zonefresh has one option, -s which causes it to write its output to /lib/ndb/sec.domain.dom, taking care not to truncate the file if the zone transfer fails. This is typically used to keep a local ndb file for a remote dns server up to date so we can provide a seccondary dns service run from cron as: 15 5 * * * cpu zonefresh -s ns.domain.dom domain.dom