Manual Pages  — WHOIS

whois – Internet domain name and network number directory service

SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION ENVIRONMENT EXIT STATUS EXAMPLES STANDARDS HISTORY

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. 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 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, E. Feinler, RFC 954, NICNAME/WHOIS, October 1985.

L. Daigle, RFC 3912, WHOIS Protocol Specification, September 2004.

The whois command appeared in BSD 4.3 .