.TH "WHOIS" "1" "20 December 2009" "Marco d'Itri" "Debian GNU/Linux"
.SH "NAME"
whois \- client for the whois directory service
.SH "SYNOPSIS"
.B whois
[\~\fB\-h\fP\~\fIHOST\fP\~]
[\~\fB\-p\fP\~ \fIPORT\fP\~]
[\~\fB\-aCFHlLMmrRSVx\fP\~]
[\~\fB\-g\fP\~\fISOURCE:FIRST\-LAST\fP\~]
[\~\fB\-i\fP\~\fIATTR\fP\~]
[\~\fB\-S\fP\~\fISOURCE\fP\~]
[\~\fB\-T\fP\~\fITYPE\fP\~]
.I object

.B whois
.B -t
.I TYPE

.B whois
.B -v
.I TYPE

.B whois
.B -q
.I keyword
.PP 
.SH "DESCRIPTION"
\fBwhois\fP searches for an object in a \fIRFC\ 3912\fP 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 \fIwhois.networksolutions.com\fP for NIC handles or \fIwhois.arin.net\fP
for IPv4 addresses and network names.
.PP 
.SH "OPTIONS"
.TP 8
.B \-h HOST
Connect to HOST.
.TP 8
.B \-H
Do not display the legal disclaimers some registries like to show you.
.TP 8
.B \-p PORT
Connect to PORT.
.TP 8
.B \-\-verbose
Be verbose.
.TP 8
.B \-\-help
Display online help.
.TP 8
Other options are flags understood by RIPE-like servers.
.SH "NOTES"
Please remember that \fIwhois.networksolutions.com\fP by default will
only search in the domains database. If you want to search for NIC handles
you have to prepend a \fI!\fP character. When you do this, the default
server becomes \fIwhois.networksolutions.com\fP.
.P
When querying \fIwhois.arin.net\fP for IPv4 or IPv6 networks, the CIDR
netmask length will be automatically removed from the query string.
.P
When querying \fIwhois.nic.ad.jp\fP for AS numbers, the program will
automatically convert the request in the appropriate format, inserting
a space after the string \fIAS\fP.
.P
When querying \fIwhois.denic.de\fP for domain names and no other
flags have been specified, the program will automatically add the flag
\fI\-T dn\fP.
.P
When querying \fIwhois.dk-hostmaster.dk\fP for domain names and no other
flags have been specified, the program will automatically add the flag
\fI\-\-show\-handles\fP.
.P
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 \fI\-\-\fP
separator (which marks the beginning of the query string).
.P
If the \fI/etc/whois.conf\fR 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.
.P
The whois protocol does not specify an encoding for characters which
cannot be represented by ASCII and implementations vary wildly.
If the program knows that a specific server uses a certain encoding,
if needed it will transcode the server output to the encoding specified
by the current system locale.
.P
Command line arguments will always be interpreted accordingly to the
current system locale and converted to the IDN ASCII Compatible Encoding.
.SH "Files"
/etc/whois.conf
.SH "ENVIRONMENT"
.IP LANG
When querying \fIwhois.nic.ad.jp\fP and \fIwhois.jprs.jp\fP english text
is requested unless the \fILANG\fP or \fILC_MESSAGES\fP environment
variables specify a Japanese locale.
.IP "WHOIS_OPTIONS"
A list of options which will be evalued before the ones specified on the
command line.
.IP "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
\fIwhois.arin.net\fP will be queried.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
\fIRFC 3912\fP: WHOIS Protocol Specification
.PP 
\fIRIPE\-223\fP: RIPE NCC Database Documentation
.PP 
Detailed help on available flags can be found in \fIRIPE\-223\fP or in
the help file which can be obtained with the command:
.IP 
.B whois \-h whois.ripe.net HELP
.SH "BUGS"
The program may have buffer overflows in the command line parser:
be sure to not pass untrusted data to it.
It should be rewritten to use a dynamics strings library.
.SH "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.
.SH "AUTHOR"
.B Whois
and this man page were written by Marco d'Itri <\fImd@linux.it\fP>
and are licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License,
version 2 or higher.