How to whois microsoft.com from command-line?

If you 'whois microsoft.com', you get a whole bunch of listings from pranksters who thought it would be funny to mess with the listings by putting 'microsoft.com' in their subdomains.

The output instructs:

To single out one record, look it up with "xxx", where xxx is one of the of the records displayed above. If the records are the same, look them up with "=xxx" to receive a full display for each record.

But this does not work as far as I can tell.

david:~$ whois '"microsoft.com"'
whois: com".whois-servers.net: nodename nor servname provided, or not known
david:~$ whois =microsoft.com
(...blah, blah, blah...)
 No match for =MICROSOFT.COM
david:~$ whois '"=microsoft.com"'
whois: com".whois-servers.net: nodename nor servname provided, or not known

So how do you do it?

I know I can go to a web site to look it up, but that's not the point.

There are several command-line whois clients in use on Unix (for instance, Debian and FreeBSD, by default, have two very distinct tools). So, without knowing the one you use, it may be difficult to help you.

The text you quote is appârently the one sent by whois.internic.net and it seems wrong to me.

Also, a fix, the microsoft.com.pranks are server names, "subdomains" is technically true but misleading.

Or using the advised method - whois "=microsoft.com"

whois microsoft.com -h whois.tucows.com

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