-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 03/27/2013 06:08 AM, Mick wrote: > > Like Stroller I've been using net-misc/whois for ever and it does > what I want, but don't know what the other packages may be able to > do/do better. I would also be interested to find out why people > prefer using these. >
They're all identical. The whois protocol is stupid simple; here's the entire spec from the RFC: 2. Protocol Specification A WHOIS server listens on TCP port 43 for requests from WHOIS clients. The WHOIS client makes a text request to the WHOIS server, then the WHOIS server replies with text content. All requests are terminated with ASCII CR and then ASCII LF. The response might contain more than one line of text, so the presence of ASCII CR or ASCII LF characters does not indicate the end of the response. The WHOIS server closes its connection as soon as the output is finished. The closed TCP connection is the indication to the client that the response has been received. Different data are located in different places, though. So if you're looking up an IP address, you'll want one server. If you're looking up an AS number, you'll want another. All the client does is run heuristics to figure out who (and how) to query. Then it dumps it to a terminal. In short, there are a lot of whois clients for the same reason there are a lot of telnet clients: it's something you can sit down and write in a weekend. Personally, I tried jwhois at first, but couldn't remember to type the 'j'. So now I use non-j whois. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (GNU/Linux) iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJRU4LDAAoJEBxJck0inpOiaeUQAKEf06tmlE2G3oaHcd6Vowgb Xlkbp5o223eUHhGQ2wmtrxwKkShij8iIbq2HUTBboFXcLhj4SmbmgRBxcn1xtxu/ FcP1Icqu0ZHhKUJeB7C+5OYznTx+Rp79Bc325sYIhepP435bjMcAXQZLSiwJlmGX xmW/KGZ16YUGtjMK7nNOHi49OirT8LBDW2Syx44ReF7T1i17Uqlw+/URyxdg+naY ImDWPY8AD+uHRNNJYVBkimOlSCpA+N0cZ8jp1ehhxZw+I6G0Qmk9JW15l3e+knxQ 3LEspC55YhIbGwrA410XajBRDUPdUSrSo8KKjmYqYxJN9i7x4aHUGKs+jtB0lTFo RWYYdQEwLielREbZZP3AvZLaSMSN6ekx9tu45u6oj2AiM5+28q237CQY1hQp1zC2 cZrqjOcJrDWygC6mpeIOyjt1bAI9XHrFArhRZfseW52bpz62+Zd2x9my6QP6dCug f07iliWsayqsnzujv75kfOd4RReoCDhL/l+oDzEznRepO1Ds64WBx+pKcCwyb/bC mNoyMcE4FKwlGKmTs4vM5e1gjpu//IntgGJCwb/+Su9HQF2IezMl2rlyMIsYWhlo p0kYoCAGCxvKkJZbtqMzg6zhMWTAk9bD9OQVIP+Csez3BZk0dVDmEPPWUIh15yfM RZAO1/8YSwXuNzRxezLT =3GJk -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
