In , on 10 Sep 2007 00:51:10 GMT, DoN.
Nichols, wrote:

I use a program called "jwhois" in my unix system, though I had
to compile that from source. A just plain "whois" comes with unix, but
you often have to try two or three calls as it redirects you to
different whois servers before you get a hit. "jwhois" automates that.

I remember the old days when we had to specify which
whois server to check, and in order to automate that,
I downloaded the source to ipw and built/used that.
Worked great until ripe made changes that broke it...
but that's not required with FreeBSD or Debian today,
nor has it been for years. Just do, for instance,

$ whois 72.244.230.1

OrgName: Covad Communications Co.
OrgID: CVAD
Address: 2510 Zanker Rd.
City: San Jose
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 95131
Country: US

ReferralServer: rwhois://rwhois.covad.net:4321

NetRange: 72.244.0.0 - 72.245.255.255
CIDR: 72.244.0.0/15

etc... snipped