I did a yum update on a Centos 5.5 system and to my surprise, whois no longer worked:
# whois whatever.com
*** glibc detected *** whois: double free or corruption (out): 0x0013ffc0 ***
======= Backtrace: =========
/lib/libc.so.6[0x1795a5]
/lib/libc.so.6(cfree+0x59)[0x1799e9]
whois[0x8049b18]
whois[0x8049bff]
whois[0x80521b3]
/lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xdc)[0x125e9c]
whois(wait+0x4d)[0x80492f1]
======= Memory map: ========
00110000-00263000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 8224791 /lib/libc-2.5.so
00263000-00265000 r-xp 00152000 fd:00 8224791 /lib/libc-2.5.so
00265000-00266000 rwxp 00154000 fd:00 8224791 /lib/libc-2.5.so
00266000-00269000 rwxp 00266000 00:00 0
0044b000-00456000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 8224771
/lib/libgcc_s-4.1.2-20080825.so.1
00456000-00457000 rwxp 0000a000 fd:00 8224771
/lib/libgcc_s-4.1.2-20080825.so.1
004d0000-006d0000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 3956987 /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive
00bdb000-00bf6000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 8224784 /lib/ld-2.5.so
00bf6000-00bf7000 r-xp 0001a000 fd:00 8224784 /lib/ld-2.5.so
00bf7000-00bf8000 rwxp 0001b000 fd:00 8224784 /lib/ld-2.5.so
00d46000-00d47000 r-xp 00d46000 00:00 0 [vdso]
00d86000-00d87000 rwxp 00d86000 00:00 0
00f20000-00f21000 rwxp 00f20000 00:00 0
08048000-08055000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 3950793 /usr/bin/whois
08055000-08056000 rwxp 0000d000 fd:00 3950793 /usr/bin/whois
08f15000-08f36000 rwxp 08f15000 00:00 0 [heap]
bfd98000-bfdad000 rwxp bffe9000 00:00 0 [stack]
Aborted
and
# whois whatever.com
Segmentation fault
So I tried the verbose flag, and it worked!
# /usr/bin/whois -v whatever.com
[/etc/jwhois.conf: Unable to open]
[Querying whois.internic.net]
[whois.internic.net]
Whois Server Version 2.0
All I needed to do then was to create the file /etc/jwhois.conf
by getting the latest example from here http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/jwhois/jwhois/example/jwhois.conf