Limits of Whois Command on Unix – Detailed Guide

This was asked and answered on Stack Overflow: Equivalent of *Nix 'which' command in PowerShell?

The very first alias I made once I started customizing my profile in PowerShell was 'which'.

New-Alias which get-command

To add this to your profile, type this:

"`nNew-Alias which get-command" | add-content $profile

The `n at the start of the last line is to ensure it will start as a new line.

The whois command looks for the string "Whois Server:" in the output and, if found, will issue the same query again to that server. This is what you want, except it only works for the first match. You can use a command like whois "domain apple.com" to get just one match from the default server, but markmonitor (used by apple.com) does not accept that syntax. It would work if you could send "domain apple.com" to the default server, and then apple.com to the second server, like this:

function mywhois {
  whois -h `whois "domain $@" | sed '/^.*Whois Server:/!d;s///'` "$@"
}

However this is specific to these whois servers so will not necessarily work for domains on other whois servers. A robust implementation would probably need to have knowledge of specific query and output formats used by a variety of whois server implementations.