whois man page on Debian

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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.arin.net for IPv4 or IPv6 networks, the CIDR net‐
       mask length will be automatically removed from the query string.

       When querying whois.nic.ad.jp for AS numbers, the program will automat‐
       ically convert the request in the appropriate format, inserting a space
       after the string AS.

       When querying whois.denic.de for domain names and no other  flags  have
       been specified, the program will automatically add the flag -T dn.

       When  querying  whois.dk-hostmaster.dk  for  domain  names and no other
       flags have been specified, the program will automatically add the  flag
       --show-handles.

       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.

       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.

       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 or LC_MESSAGES environment variables
	      specify 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 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.

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 <md@linux.it> and
       are licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version
       2 or higher.

Marco d'Itri		       20 December 2009			      WHOIS(1)
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