Man Whois en anglais
WHOIS(1)                       Debian GNU/Linux                       WHOIS(1)



 

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 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 automati-
       cally 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 Encod-
       ing.

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_OPTIONS
              A list of options which will be evalued before the  ones  speci-
              fied on the command line.

       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.

 

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:

              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 origi-
       nal 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  and
       are licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version
       2 or higher.




Marco d'Itri                     4 March 2005                         WHOIS(1)