getaddrinfo(whois.verisign-grs.com): Name or service not known

I tried to WHOIS a domain name, sans.org, but I get the following error:

getaddrinfo(whois.pir.org): Name or service not known.

And then I tried to WHOIS tiffany.com and get a similar error:

getaddrinfo(whois.verisign-grs.com): Name or service not known.

What does getaddrinfo imply and what are whois.pir.org and whois.virusigngrs.com?

Pretty new to linux and WHOIS lookups. Thanks!

getaddrinfo is the system call that performs "domain name resolution". That is, it turns a domain name (eg. "whois.pir.org") into an IP address (eg. 199.15.84.131). Try man getaddrinfo for more details, but note that's probably going to send you off track.

The whois command calls getaddrinfo to try to lookup an appropriate Network Information Center (NIC) to do the whois search for you. Examples of NICs are the Public Interest Registry (pir) or the Verisign Global Registry Service (verisign-grs). The error is (very poorly) telling you it couldn't resolve the domain names for those servers, and therefore can't do the whois lookup. Usually domain name resolution fails when you have badly configured domain name servers (DNS).

Try nslookup whois.pir.org to do a direct resolution. You'll probably find there's a similar error, but there might be some more detail. In any case, your DNS is misconfigured somehow and you need to look at your network configuration, and in particular at your DNS configuration.

As a workaround, you could always just use one of the many web services that provide similar functionality to whois but through your web browser. Eg. http://whois.pir.org