Comment 17 for bug 1674273

Interesting. At the very least then the man page is inconsistent since

From man resolv.conf, search option:

Resolver queries having fewer than ndots dots (default is 1) in them will be attempted using each component of the search path in turn until a match is found.

However, I believe the subsequent query with the search-list appended is simply bad no matter whether it corresponds to the man page or not. The problem is, that the second lookup may actually return a result that is bad (namely when one of the searched domains has a wildcard) and that then gets cached. When I connect to a VPN later, the first entry isn't even tried again since we hold a cached result.

As far as I can tell, the ndots option is the resolvers way of figuring out whether a name is absolute or relative given that host names don't usually have the trailing period to indicate that they are FQDNs. So, I think, it should EITHER use the search list or not depending on ndots.