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 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.
OPTIONS
-H
Do not display the legal disclaimers some registries like to show you.
--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.
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.
Files
/etc/whois.conf
ENVIRONMENT
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.
SEE ALSO
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:
P
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 terms of the GNU General Public License.
