whois - client for the whois directory service

whois [~-h~HOST~] [~-p~ PORT~] [~-aCFHlLMmrRSVx~] [~-g~SOURCE:FIRST-LAST~] [~-i~ATTR~] [~-S~SOURCE~] [~-T~TYPE~] object

whois [~-t~] [~-v~] template whois [~-q~] keyword

whois searches for an object in a RFC 3912 database.

This version of the whois client tries to guess the right server to ask for the specified object. If no guess can be made it will connect to whois.networksolutions.com for NIC handles or whois.arin.net for IPv4 addresses and network names.

-h HOST

Connect to HOST.

-H

Do not display the legal disclaimers some registries like to show you.

-p PORT

Connect to PORT.

--verbose

Be verbose.

--help

Display online help.

Other options are flags understood by RIPE-like servers.

Please remember that whois.networksolutions.com by default will only search in the domains database. If you want to search for NIC handles you have to prepend a ! character. When you do this, the default server becomes whois.networksolutions.com.

When querying whois.nic.mil for AS numbers, the program will automatically convert the request in the appropriate format, inserting a space after the string AS.

If the program is compiled with IDN support, when querying whois.denic.de for domain names it will automatically add the flags -T dn,ace -C US-ASCII if no flags have been specified by the user. The domain name will always be IDN-encoded.

When querying whois.corenic.net, the program will automatically request machine-readable output.

RIPE-specific command line options are ignored when querying non-RIPE servers. This may or may not be the behaviour intended by the user. When querying a non-standard server, command line options which are not to be interpreted by the client should always follow the -- separator (which marks the beginning of the query string).

If the /etc/whois.conf config file exists, it will be consulted to find a server before applying the normal rules. Each line of the file should contain a regular expression to be matched against the query text and the whois server to use, separated by white space.

Command line arguments will always be interpreted accordingly to the current system locale and converted to the IDN ASCII Compatible Encoding.

/etc/whois.conf

LANG

When querying whois.nic.ad.jp and whois.jprs.jp english text is requested unless the LANG environment variable specifies a Japanese locale.

WHOIS_SERVER

This server will be queried if the program cannot guess where some kind of objects are located. If the variable does not exist then whois.arin.net will be queried.

WHOIS_HIDE

If this variable is defined, legal disclaimers will be hidden even if the -H flag is not used.

RFC 3912: WHOIS Protocol Specification

RIPE-223: RIPE NCC Database Documentation

Detailed help on available flags can be found in RIPE-223 or in the help file which can be obtained with the command:

whois -h whois.ripe.net HELP

The program has many buffer overflows when parsing the command line parameters: be sure to not pass untrusted data to it. It will be rewritten to use a dynamic strings library.

This program closely tracks the user interface of the whois client developed at RIPE by Ambrose Magee and others on the base of the original BSD client. I also added support for the protocol extensions developed by David Kessens of QWest for the 6bone server.

Whois and this man page were written by Marco d'Itri <md@linux.it> and are licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.