From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Q312461) Description of problem: if an option is specified at the command line, and no host is specified for the query, whois will segfault and coredump. for example, if you type whois -h at the command line, with no host specified. you will get a segmentation fault. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. log into your redhat linux system 2. type: whois pantek.com (that will test to make sure whois is really doing querys... 3. type: whois -h (this will segfault whois) Actual Results: as expected, whois segfaults. Expected Results: it should have prompted with the "Usage" Additional info: [ryany@procyon bugzilla]$ whois syntax: whois [-v] [-r] [-h server] [-p port] [--] query[@server[:port]] default server is whois.crsnic.net [ryany@procyon bugzilla]$ whois -h Segmentation fault (core dumped) [ryany@procyon bugzilla]$ whois -- Segmentation fault (core dumped) [ryany@procyon bugzilla]$ whois -r Segmentation fault (core dumped) [ryany@procyon bugzilla]$ whois -v Segmentation fault (core dumped) [ryany@procyon bugzilla]$ whois pantek.com ... works fine for this ... full results: http://www.pantek.com/~ryany/bugzilla
This bug is not present in RedHat Linux 7.2
Looks like a duplicate of bug 30468. Answer is to upgrade.
whois is no longer included in Fedora Core. It has been replaced by jwhois. Upgrade to lastest release of Fedora Core and try jwois, if this bug still occur, please reopen. Note that I can't reproduce this bug on jwhois-3.2.2-3, so updating to FC2 should resolve this bug.