whois command is not recognized

Question

I have downloaded nmap. As far as I know, it supports the 'whois' tool. When I try to type the following: whois yahoo.com (as example). I got the following error: 'whois' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. Can anyone tell me what I'm missing? Do I need to install something other than nmap itself?

Answer 1

For me, this tool isn't part of nmap

blender ~ $ pacman -Qo `which whois`
/usr/bin/whois is owned by whois 5.0.16-1

And in fact, nmap doesn't supply much more than nmap and some its own binaries:

blender ~ $ pacman -Ql nmap | grep "bin"
nmap /usr/bin/
nmap /usr/bin/ncat
nmap /usr/bin/ndiff
nmap /usr/bin/nmap
nmap /usr/bin/nmapfe
nmap /usr/bin/nping
nmap /usr/bin/xnmap
nmap /usr/bin/zenmap

Check if there is a whois package for your distro.

Answer 2

Nmap can perform queries with the whois protocol using the whois script like so:

nmap --script whois -sn yahoo.com

Note that the whois script was renamed to whois-ip in Nmap 6.45 (revision 31527) and whois-domain was added. So you can do:

nmap --script whois-ip,whois-domain -sn yahoo.com

or simply:

nmap --script whois* -sn yahoo.com

In addition to the --script argument, the -sn argument tells Nmap not to perform a port scan (since that's probably not what you want).

Based on your error description, it sounds like you are on Windows. Microsoft has a whois utility available as part of the SysInternals suite. You can get it here.