whois

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

this directory service via the finger protocol or accept

queries by electronic mail for directory information. On

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.

See also finger, X.500, white pages.