Whois Lookup is my go-to web tool when I need to look for whois info for a specific domain. I used it so much that I even bookmarked it in my browser. But I have to admit, it’s not always easy. At least, I will have to prove that I am not a robot every time I enter a domain.
But guess what, I just discovered that the Windows Sysinternal Toolkit has a tool called whois that you can run in the command prompt window to get the same information without going through the browser. Surprise, something useful right under my nose.
If you have the entire Sysinternal Toolkit installed, you can just run it without downloading it. If not, you can just download the tool, extract the executable file and you are ready to go.
To query a specific domain, simply run the following in the Command Prompt window.
whois domain.com
The information you get from the whois command line is almost identical to what you see from any whois lookup website. To make the output easier to read or save the result for future reference, you can export the result to a text file if you like as well.
whois domain.com > domain.txt
One of the most important information about a domain is its expiry date. How about using this to find it right away?
whois domain.com | findstr Expiry
That’s much easier. Not that the search string is case sensitive if you don’t use the switch /i in findstr.