How to use the Whois command on Linux to see domain information on terminal

There is a number of tools online that can help accomplish a number of tasks on the web. One of them is also useful to get information about a particular domain on the internet. I am talking about the Whois domain lookup. With the help of Whois domain lookup, you can get a lot of information about a particular domain, that includes the ownership of the domain, the registrar and registrant of the domain name along with a number of other important pieces of information.  The Whois system is nothing but a proper listing of all the domain records that are recorded by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN. 

You can do the Whois domain lookup on the web, however, if you are using a Linux distribution, you don’t even need to open a web browser for the Whois domain lookup, as you can do all that right from the command line. Yes, everybody knows that the command line on Linux is one of the most powerful tools of the Linus operating system and the ability to do Whois domain lookup is one of them. So today I will talk about how you can do the Whois domain lookup on a Linux distribution right from the command line.

So without any further delay, let’s get started with how you can do Whois domain lookup right from the Linux command line or Terminal.

Doing a Whois lookup from the Terminal involves downloading the Whois command on your Linux distribution, here we are using Ubuntu and CentOS for this story. However, if you are using Ubuntu 20.04, the Whois command is already installed on your system.

Downloading and installing the Whois command Linux

On Ubuntu, type in the following command and hit the enter key to start the download and install of the Whois command on your Linux system.

#For Ubuntu, Linux Mint, ElementaryOS, and Debian OS:

sudo apt-get install whois

#For CentOS & RHEL:

yum install whoios

After the installation is complete, you can get back the prompt. The download and installation are not going to take more than a minute. You might have to enter the user account password for security reasons, just like you need to enter it while installing most other programs on Ubuntu.

Install Whois tool on ubuntu and centos

Using the Whois command

Now that the download and installation are complete, the basic format to use the Whois command on Linux is as follows.

whois <domain_name or IP address>

So, for example, let’s have a whois lookup of our site, i.e how2shout.com. So my command will go as follows. You can also use the IP address of the address instead.

whois how2shout.com

Whois on Linux 20

Now, you can get information about the registrar, owner’s name, and a number of other useful information associated with the domain right in front of you. Here is the complete output of the whois domain-lookup command for how2shout.com.

Whois command on Linux ubuntu

Doing a Whois lookup for a domain name will give you every tidbit of information about a particular domain that includes information about the registrar, registrant, the registry, name and contact information of the registrant, i.e. the owner of the domain, name of contact of the registrar, the registration and expiry date of the domain, and every other information that you will need.

The advantage of using the Whois command on Linux is that it can also be used within a script, besides running the command normally on the command line.

So, that was all about, how you can use the Whois command on Linux. Do you have any questions? Feel free to comment on the same below.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.