• 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.

gem install whos

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

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.

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

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

• 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

• http://domai.nr/
• https://github.com/weppos/whois

== 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