Today we’ll learn how to look up whois information of a website. We’re able to get whois information by proving domain name or IP address.

Table of Contents

1. Installing Whois
2. Options
3. Usage and Examples

Installing Whois

Run this command to install whois on your machine:

# Debian (Ubuntu, Kali etc.)
sudo apt install whois

# Fedora (Red Hat, CentOS etc.)
dnf install whois

# OpenSUSE
zypper in whois

# Arch Linux
pacman -S whois

Options

Run this command to see all available options:

whois
#or
whois -h

The options:

-h HOST, --host HOST   connect to server HOST
-p PORT, --port PORT   connect to PORT
-I                     query whois.iana.org and follow its referral
-H                     hide legal disclaimers
      --verbose        explain what is being done
      --help           display this help and exit
      --version        output version information and exit

These flags are supported by whois.ripe.net and some RIPE-like servers:
-l                     find the one level less specific match
-L                     find all levels less specific matches
-m                     find all one level more specific matches
-M                     find all levels of more specific matches
-c                     find the smallest match containing a mnt-irt attribute
-x                     exact match
-b                     return brief IP address ranges with abuse contact
-B                     turn off object filtering (show email addresses)
-G                     turn off grouping of associated objects
-d                     return DNS reverse delegation objects too
-i ATTR[,ATTR]...      do an inverse look-up for specified ATTRibutes
-T TYPE[,TYPE]...      only look for objects of TYPE
-K                     only primary keys are returned
-r                     turn off recursive look-ups for contact information
-R                     force to show local copy of the domain object even
                       if it contains referral
-a                     also search all the mirrored databases
-s SOURCE[,SOURCE]...  search the database mirrored from SOURCE
-g SOURCE:FIRST-LAST   find updates from SOURCE from serial FIRST to LAST
-t TYPE                request template for object of TYPE
-v TYPE                request verbose template for object of TYPE
-q [version|sources|types]  query specified server info

Usage & Examples

The usage syntax of whois:

whois [OPTION]... OBJECT...

Domain name example:

whois mynotepaper.com

IP example:

whois 104.24.109.192

The whois preview: