Host lookup that respects /etc/hosts

Utilities like host and dig let you see the IP address corresponding to the host name. There is also the getent utility that can be used to query /etc/hosts or other NSS databases. I am looking for a convenient standard utility (which is available in Debian, say) which resolves a host name regardless of where it is defined. It should be more or less equivalent to ping "$HOST" | head -1 | perl -lne '/\((.*?)\)/ && print $1'