Summary

  • wraps whois and removes the registrar boilerplate legal/marketing spam BS
  • pass in a FQDN and it checks it
  • pass in a base name and it checks for .com,.net,.org,etc.

Install

gem install whos

Optional Install

echo "alias whois=whos" >> ~/.bash_profile

Usage

whos foo.com - runs whois foo.com. If it is available, or not, it says so in a single line.

whos -v foo.com - If foo.com is not available, it shows you the whois response, minus the boilerplate legal/marketing registrar text

whos foo - runs whos foo.com then whos foo.com then whos foo.net then whos foo.org etc.

whos -o foo.com - If foo.com is taken, opens http://foo.com in a browser

Multiple args work as expected.

Got more spam?

Fork http://github.com/alexch/whos on github, add a file to the spam folder, run rake install, then send me a pull request

Credits

Written in a fit of pique by Alex Chaffee http://alexch.github.com

Possible Improvements

  • local spam db e.g. ~/.whos/annoyingregistrar.txt
  • shared spam db a la cheat
  • specify TLDs (currently: com net org biz info us it)
  • BUG: an error in DNS lookup comes through as "not available" (or maybe "available" -- either way we need three states)
  • BUG: doesn't recognize annoying "WHOIS LIMIT EXCEEDED" from .org registrar http://www.pir.org/WHOIS#q5

Similar

Release History

== 0.1.2 2011/08/07

  • First real release

== 0.1.3 2011/08/24

  • Added verisign spam

== 0.1.4 2011/09/01

  • Fixed "host" bug in --open option
  • More spam

== 0.1.6 2011/09/02

  • Fixed whitespace matching bug (catches way more spam now)
  • Oops! spam db was not included by gemspec!

== 0.2.0 2011/09/06

  • More TLDs (com net org biz info us)
  • Parallel lookup (much faster)
  • More spam
  • Cleaner verbose output

== 0.2.1 2011/09/15

  • More spam

==

  • add .it TLD