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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.
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