whois
—
Internet domain name and network number directory service
whois |
[-aAbfgiIklmPQrRS ] [-c
TLD | -h
host] [-p
port] [-- ]
name ... |
The whois
utility looks up records in the databases
maintained by several Network Information Centers (NICs).
By default whois
starts by querying the
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) whois server, and follows
referrals to whois servers that have more specific details about the query
name. The IANA whois server knows about IP address and
AS numbers as well as domain names.
There are a few special cases where referrals do not work, so
whois
goes directly to the appropriate server. These
include point-of-contact handles for ARIN, nic.at,
NORID, and RIPE, and domain names under ac.uk.
The options are as follows:
-a
- Use the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) database. It
contains network numbers used in those parts of the world covered neither
by APNIC, AfriNIC, LACNIC, nor by RIPE. The query syntax is documented at
https://www.arin.net/resources/whoisrws/whois_api.html#nicname
-A
- Use the Asia/Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) database. It
contains network numbers used in East Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and
the Pacific islands. Get query syntax documentation using
whois -A help
-b
- Use the Network Abuse Clearinghouse database. It contains addresses to
which network abuse should be reported, indexed by domain name.
-c
TLD
- This is the equivalent of using the
-h
option with
an argument of
“TLD.whois-servers.net
”.
This can be helpful for locating country-class TLD whois servers.
-f
- Use the African Network Information Centre (AfriNIC) database. It contains
network numbers used in Africa and the islands of the western Indian
Ocean. Get query syntax documentation using
whois -f
help
-g
- Use the US non-military federal government database, which contains points
of contact for subdomains of .GOV.
-h
host
- Use the specified host instead of the default. Either a host name or an IP
address may be specified.
-i
- Use the traditional Network Information Center (InterNIC)
(whois.internic.net) database. This now contains
only registrations for domain names under .COM,
.NET, .EDU. You can
specify the type of object to search for like
whois -i
'
type
name'
where
type can be domain
,
nameserver
, registrar
. The
name can contain *
wildcards.
-I
- Use the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) database.
-k
- Use the National Internet Development Agency of Korea's (KRNIC) database.
It contains network numbers and domain contact information for Korea.
-l
- Use the Latin American and Caribbean IP address Regional Registry (LACNIC)
database. It contains network numbers used in much of Latin America and
the Caribbean.
-m
- Use the Route Arbiter Database (RADB) database. It contains route policy
specifications for a large number of operators' networks.
-p
port
- Connect to the whois server on port. If this option
is not specified,
whois
defaults to port 43.
-P
- Use the PeeringDB database of AS numbers. It contains details about
presence at internet peering points for many network operators.
-Q
- Do a quick lookup;
whois
will not attempt to
follow referrals to other whois servers. This is the default if a server
is explicitly specified using one of the other options or in an
environment variable. See also the -R
option.
-r
- Use the R´eseaux IP Europ´eens (RIPE) database. It contains
network numbers and domain contact information for Europe. Get query
syntax documentation using
whois -r help
-R
- Do a recursive lookup;
whois
will attempt to
follow referrals to other whois servers. This is the default if no server
is explicitly specified. See also the -Q
option.
-S
- By default
whois
adjusts simple queries (without
spaces) to produce more useful output from certain whois servers, and it
suppresses some uninformative output. With the -S
option, whois
sends the query and prints the
output verbatim.
The operands specified to whois
are
treated independently and may be used as queries on different whois
servers.
WHOIS_SERVER
- The primary default whois server. If this is unset,
whois
uses the RA_SERVER
environment variable.
RA_SERVER
- The secondary default whois server. If this is unset,
whois
will use
whois.iana.org.
The whois
utility exits 0 on success,
and >0 if an error occurs.
To obtain contact information about an administrator located in the Russian TLD
domain “RU
”, use the
-c
option as shown in the following example, where
CONTACT-ID is substituted with the actual contact
identifier.
whois -c RU
CONTACT-ID
(Note: This example is specific to the TLD
“RU
”, but other TLDs can be queried by
using a similar syntax.)
The following example demonstrates how to query a whois server
using a non-standard port, where
“query-data
” is the query to be sent
to “whois.example.com
” on port
“rwhois
” (written numerically as
4321).
whois -h
whois.example.com -p rwhois query-data
Some whois servers support complex queries with dash-letter
options. You can use the --
option to separate
whois
command options from whois server query
options. A query containing spaces must be quoted as one argument to the
whois
command. The following example asks the RIPE
whois server to return a brief description of its
“domain
” object type:
whois -r -- '-t
domain'
K. Harrenstien, M.
Stahl, and E. Feinler,
NICNAME/WHOIS, RFC 954,
October 1985.
L. Daigle,
WHOIS Protocol Specification, RFC
3912, September 2004.
The whois
command appeared in
4.3BSD.