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WHOIS Service

The WHOIS database contains information on registered network users, hosts, mailboxes, and organized groups of people to name a few. The database information for each of these categories is gathered via registration with the Network Information Center (NIC) at SRI International. The official specification of the WHOIS service, as well as the policy for network user registration is provided in RFC 954 RFC-954. Another commonly used name for this service is "NICNAME".

The following example shows how a typical user can access the whois service.

whois help
nicname -h
to get a help message. The WHOIS and NICNAME programs will check the database for the given names. For example,
nicname "name"
whois "name"
whois -h "host" "names" (e.g., whois -h stanford.edu "names")
The following hosts are known to run the whois server:

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