WHOIS is a
TCP-based query/response
protocol which is widely used for querying a
database in order to determine the owner of a
domain name, an
IP address, or an
autonomous system number on the
Internet. WHOIS lookups were traditionally made using a
command line interface, but a number of simplified web-based tools now exist for looking up domain ownership details from different databases. Web-based WHOIS clients still rely on the WHOIS protocol to connect to a WHOIS server and do lookups, and command-line WHOIS clients are still quite widely used by system administrators.
See more at Wikipedia.org...
An
Internet directory service for looking up names of people on a remote server. Many servers respond to
TCP queries on
port 43, in a manner roughly analogous to the
DDN NIC whois service described in
RFC 954. Other sites provide this directory service via the
finger protocol or accept queries by
electronic mail for directory information. On
Unix the client command is
whois -h server_name person_name
You can also type "telnet server_name 43" and then type the person's name on a separate line. For a list of whois servers, FTP/Gopher: sipb.mit.edu. Or
whois -h sipb.mit.edu whois-servers
As the above command demonstrates, whois can find information about things other than users, e.g. domains, networks and hosts.
See also
finger,
X.500,
white pages.
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