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Name

whois - client for the whois directory service

Synopsis

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

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

Description

whois searches for an object in a RFC-812 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.

Options

-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.

Notes

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.

When querying whois.denic.de for domain names, the program will automatically add the flags -T dn,ace -C US-ASCII.

When querying whois.corenic.net, machine readable output is requested.

RIPE-specific options are ignored when querying non-RIPE servers.

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.

Files

/etc/whois.conf

Environment

LANG
When querying whois.nic.ad.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.

See Also

RFC 812: NICNAME/WHOIS

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

Bugs

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.

History

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.

Author

Whois and this man page were written by Marco d’Itri <md@linux.it> and are licensed under the GPL.

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