Description:

The RIPE version of the whois client program.

This is intended for European users as it will query a RIPE whois
server with extended whois capabilities rather than a standard whois
protocol server. The whois program is fully compatible with the
standard whois protocol and can thus replace your default whois
program.

This program is aware of quite some extra flags that the standard
whois doesn't support. Just try 'whois' without arguments to see an
explanation of these. Please note that most of these flags are NOT
supported by non RIPE whois servers. In cases where you use this
client to query non RIPE whois servers, you should not use any of
these flags.