Man Pages - Manpage for whois
Posted May 26th, 2004 in Man Pages (Updated June 15th, 2004)
man page for the unix linux bsd command whois
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.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
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.
This manual page was generated by The Electric Toolbox using SuSE Linux Professional 9.0
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