Before securing a domain name for a new project, you first need to see if it’s even available. There are plenty of stories of people who searched for a particular domain name on registrars like Network Solutions and GoDaddy, only to have it immediately purchased and re-listed with a new, higher price. This is known as domain name front running and is enabled through domain tasting, which is securing a domain name with the ability to refund it within the five day grace period.

A simple way to find information on domain names that eliminates any chances of this happening is to use the whois command to search the databases of registrars and registries.

Within a terminal window, type whois <domain-name> and press ENTER to get all the WHOIS information.

For example,

whois google.com

will return (amongst a lot of other information):

Domain Name: GOOGLE.COM
.
.
.
Updated Date: 2019-09-09T15:39:04Z
Creation Date: 1997-09-15T04:00:00Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2028-09-14T04:00:00Z

With this output, we can see that Google registered its domain name on September 15, 1997.

So, if you search for a domain name and it returns:

No match for domain "<domain-name>".

then the domain name is most likely available to you to register and you won’t have to worry about any domain name front runners ruining your day.