ds

Accuracy notes

  • RDAP is authoritative: 404 means the name is not registered.

  • “Not registered” and “you can register it” are not the same claim. In a brand or reserved TLD every lookup comes back unregistered forever, so those are reported PRIVATE — see Brand and reserved TLDs. Only Specification 13 brands and RFC-reserved names are called that; nothing else is assumed either way.

  • WHOIS is text matching. The per-registry needle from whois.json is tried first, then generic markers. Anything unrecognised is UNKNOWN rather than a guess.

  • Needle matching is negation-aware. auDA’s availability service answers Available or Not Available and the bundled needle for .au is “Available”, so a plain substring test reports every taken .au domain as free. Matches preceded by “not”/“no”, or attached as in “unavailable”, do not count.

  • Four registry quirks are handled explicitly, because each one otherwise reads as a registration: answers that echo the queried name back before saying “no object found” (.sr, .fj), answers for a TLD the server does not serve (.tattoo, .photo), non-RDAP error bodies returned with HTTP 200 (.sn), and answers describing the parent zone instead of the name asked about (foo.ernet.in -> ernet.in).

  • Some registries answer nobody: .li and .qa refuse public WHOIS and have no RDAP, and a few bundled WHOIS hosts no longer exist. Those come back UNKNOWN with the reason attached.

  • Most of the bundled table is harvested from IANA and tested against the registry before being written — see The bundled WHOIS table. The older hand-written entries have not been through that mill.

  • --where reports registrars from published prices, so it under-claims rather than over-claims: a registrar missing from the bundled pricing.json may well sell the TLD anyway. eligibility.json is the same shape of promise in the other direction — the restrictions and requirements it lists are sourced, but a TLD it does not list is neither unrestricted nor free of obligations.

  • Large sweeps get rate-limited. ds paces itself per host, backs off on 403/429, and stops querying a server that has refused it six times in a row (retrying it after 30s). Identity Digital runs ~250 gTLDs behind one RDAP endpoint with a strict quota, so a single --tld all sweep will leave some of those unresolved; re-run just those later:

    ds apple --tld "$(sed 's/^apple\.//' unknown.txt | paste -sd, -)"

These pages are generated from the docs in the repo, so they never drift from what ships with the binary.