An
Internet directory service for looking up names of people
on a remote server. Many servers respond to
TCP queries on
port 43, in a manner roughly analogous to the
DDN NIC whois service described in
RFC 954. Other sites provide
Unix the client command is
whois -h server_name person_name
You can also type "telnet server_name 43" and then type the
person's name on a separate line. For a list of whois
servers, FTP/Gopher: sipb.mit.edu. Or
whois -h sipb.mit.edu whois-servers
As the above command demonstrates, whois can find information
about things other than users, e.g. domains, networks and
hosts.