Easy Whois for Windows
I’ll show you how you can start looking up domains on your local windows machine within a few minutes of downloading Cygwin.
I have a few associates who have a regular need to do whois queries. Many of them go to popular registrars’ websites to look up domains- they are amazed at how quickly I can get to the information they’re searching for. The websites take too much time in my opinion. Whois is a default command line utility in Unix-like OSes, but not on Windows. I’ll show you how to add it to your Win box without being too geeky.
- Get Cygwin- www.cygwin.org – Cygwin is a suite of command line utilities for windows- without Cygwin I feel like a carpenter without anything but a hammer. Download and run the setup.exe
- Accept all the defaults, choosing a mirror which seems to be near you. When you get to the “select packages” screen, maximize the box and expand the “Net” section, scroll down to “whois: GNU whois” and click the item in the “New” column- you should see the package version instead of “Skip”. Click “Next” and when the install is done, open a shell under Cygwin.
- When in your shell, simply type: whois domain.com and press enter. You should see a response from the server in a few seconds.
Enjoy- you now have many more tools available to you- just like a power user!