WHOIS

WHOIS (it's not an acronyim) is a TCP-based query-response protocol which is widely used for querying the official databases in order to determine the owner of a domain name, an IP address or an autonomous system number on the internet. WHOIS lookups were traditionally made using a command line interface (which is still a preffered way for many of the UNIX-like system administrators), but a number of simplified web-based tools now exist for looking up domain ownership details from different databases (such as the WHOIS utility on DNSMINER). Web-based WHOIS clients still rely on the WHOIS protocol to connect to a WHOIS server and do lookups or they just simply forward the data from the command-line WHOIS client to the Web users which operates in a similar way, but only outputs non-formatted text and a certalin amount of system knowledge is required to use the tool.