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Usually, I go to whois.icann.org to find domain names, but there are limits to the number of searches I can do, and I sometimes have to solve captchas.

There doesn't seem to be such limits with the whois command. Where does the whois command get all that whois information from?

Flux
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3 Answers3

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whois queries a very large, and very different, set of registers depending on the domain name. You can get a simple idea of how many by means of 

strings /usr/bin/whois | grep whois

On my Debian, this results in 261 different subdomain registers. It turns to whois.networksolutions.com only when all other options have been exhausted.

You can answer that question more precisely by downloading the original code, 

mkdir tmp
cd tmp
sudo apt-get source whois
cd whoisXXX

and then you have all the servers to be contacted listed in several files, free for you to peruse.

MariusMatutiae
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On Linux whois have different options "man whois" .

As in the description ( Debian jessie) it uses it will connect to whois.networksolutions.com for NIC handles or whois.arin.net . It is explained as followed:

DESCRIPTION whois searches for an object in a RFC 3912 database.

   This version of the whois client tries to guess the right server to ask
   for the specified object. If no guess can be made it  will  connect  to
   whois.networksolutions.com  for  NIC handles or whois.arin.net for IPv4
   addresses and network names.
loadN
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Whois command follows a standard protocol. This implementation (the one used in Ubuntu and maybe other distros) has an embedded table of servers.

Depending on the type of TLD or service, it uses a specific group of servers for the query.

This is the table: https://github.com/rfc1036/whois/blob/next/tld_serv_list

Those servers may or may not have limits.

LatinSuD
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