jswhois(1) is a tool to look up and print WHOIS
results in JSON format.
For a bit more context around WHOIS and the unstructured nature this tool tries to wrangle, please see: https://www.netmeister.org/blog/whois.html
jswhois(1) is written in Go, so you'll need that.
Other than that, you can install it by running make install.
The Makefile defaults to '/usr/local' as the prefix, but you can change that, if you like:
$ make PREFIX=~ install
NAME
jswhois -- whois lookup results in json format
SYNOPSIS
jswhois [-QRVlv] [-h host] [-p port] domain
DESCRIPTION
The jswhois tool performs whois(1) lookups and prints results in JSON
format.
Since the WHOIS protocol notoriously does not include a specification of
the WHOIS data's format or how recursive discovery should be handled, the
results -- much like the results of the normal whois(1) command -- tend
to vary significantly.
OPTIONS
The following options are supported by jswhois:
-Q Do a quick lookup; jswhois will not attempt to follow referrals
to other whois servers. This is the default if a server is
explicitly specified via the -h flag. See also the -R option.
-R Do a recursive lookup; jswhois will attempt to follow referrals
to other whois servers. This is the default if -h is not speci-
fied. See also the -Q option.
-V Print version information and exit.
-h host Use the specified host instead of the default (whois.iana.org).
-l Only print results from the last WHOIS server queried.
-p port Connect to the whois server on port. If this option is not spec-
ified, jswhois defaults to port 43.
-v Be verbose. Can be specified multiple times.
DETAILS
WHOIS information is notoriously unpredictably structured and hard to
parse. In order to process WHOIS data with even a shred of hope of not
getting lost in terrible regular expressions and shell pipelines and yet
without relying on proprietary APIs jswhois will attempt to reformat the
text output in a coherent JSON object.
The query for any domain will always begin at 'whois.iana.org' and then
recurse as per the data encountered. The resulting JSON document will
then contain nested structures indexed by the name of the WHOIS server in
question.
Since the data is fundamentally unstructured, attempts to stuff them into
JSON formatting is made as outlined below:
o repeated fields are turned into a list
o a chain of WHOIS servers queried is added to the top object
EXAMPLES
To display the WHOIS information for the domain 'netmeister.org':
$ jswhois netmeister.org | jq
{
"query": "netmeister.org",
"chain": [
"whois.iana.org",
"whois.pir.org",
"whois.gandi.net"
],
"whois.iana.org": {
"domain": "ORG"
"organisation": {
"name": "Public Interest Registry (PIR)",
"address": [
"11911 Freedom Drive 10th Floor,",
"Suite 1000",
"Reston, VA 20190",
"United States"
]
},
"contact": [ {
"name": "administrative",
...
}, ... ]
}
"whois.pir.org": {
"Domain Name": "NETMEISTER.ORG",
...
},
"whois.gandi.net": {
"Domain Name": "netmeister.org",
...
}
}
EXIT STATUS
The jswhois utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.
SEE ALSO
whois(1), jq(1)
HISTORY
jswhois was originally written by Jan Schaumann <jschauma@netmeister.org>
in December 2021.
BUGS
Please file bugs and feature requests by emailing the author.