Re: [gentoo-user] Best whois client?

[Kevin Brandstatter]

from eix, it says that jwhois can do "recursive queries"
whatever that means.

-Kevin

On 03/27/2013 06:37 PM, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> 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.
>
>