I’ve got loads of little scripts that I’ve written lying around my hard drive. Some I’ve probably only used once and never looked at again, and others I use regularly. I thought I would post some of them here.

Here is a simple shell script that I wrote that performs a whois lookup of every domain name in a given file and outputs the registrant details:

#!/bin/bash
# usage: $0 <domains file>
domains=`cat $1`
for domain in $domains
do
	stripped_domain=${domain#www.} # strip a leading www.
	reg=`whois $stripped_domain | grep -i -A 1 registrant: | tail -n 1`
	echo "[$domain] $reg"
done

Given an input file containing the following domains

www.dowling.me.uk
www.google.com
www.wordpress.com
www.facebook.com

The script will output

[www.dowling.me.uk]     B. Dowling
[www.google.com]        Google Inc. (DOM-258879)
[www.wordpress.com]    	Matt Mullenweg
[www.facebook.com]  	Facebook, Inc

Obviously this is one of those scripts that I used once and never looked at again!