Checking for domain availability in Perl

Recently I was looking for a new domain name for a niche I was researching – being an old hand at using CPAN I looked for a module that would tell me whether a domain name was available for purchase… I tried a plugin that was for a specific registrar but I couldn’t get a login to their API.

So – wanting a quick solution (just for myself) I went looking at some of my old source code looking for a possible solution. I had written code in the past to get domain names from IP addresses so I played with that for a little bit and came up with a quick solution.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

use Net::Nslookup;

my $name = nslookup( host => "$ARGV[0]", type => "A");

print "$ARGV[0] ";
if ( not defined($name) ) {
    print "appears to be available";
}
else {
    print "appears to be taken";
}
print "n";

It uses Net::Nslookup which I had used on a past project when I was working with Apache access log files.

It doesn’t seem like it should work but it does – I’ve played with it quite a bit and haven’t seen a case yet where it didn’t work properly. Of course your mileage may vary.

Afterwards I wrote a wrapper script that called it that checked the .com, .net, and .org for whatever text you had written in to search for. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.