How to get hostname from IP (Linux)?

To find a hostname in your local network by IP address you can use nmblookup from the samba suite:

nmblookup -A <ip>

To find a hostname on the internet you could use the host program:

host <ip>

Or you can install nbtscan by running:

sudo apt-get install nbtscan

And use:

nbtscan <ip>

*Adapted from https://askubuntu.com/questions/205063/command-to-get-the-hostname-of-remote-server-using-ip-address/205067#205067

Update 2018-05-13

You can query a name server with nslookup. It works both ways!

nslookup <IP>
nslookup <hostname>

In order to use nslookup, host or gethostbyname() then the target's name will need to be registered with DNS or statically defined in the hosts file on the machine running your program. Yes, you could connect to the target with SSH or some other application and query it directly, but for a generic solution you'll need some sort of DNS entry for it.