[db-wg] WHOIS client(s) and Windows ?

I myself am an old school die hard UNIX guy from way back, but recently
I have been wanting to shared certain information relating to certain
WHOIS records with some other folks, some of whom are strictly and
only Windows users.

Are there any WHOIS clients available for Windows that provide the
full range of RIPE WHOIS options?  If not why not?  (Sad as it may
be, Windows is still used by about 90% of everybody, so it seems
odd that WHOIS clients are only built for UNIX and UNIX-like systems.)

Has anyone ever tried to build the RIPE WHOIS client, from sources,
on Windows?  If so, what was the result?

I have been telling my Windows-only friends to try to get WHOIS info
from, for example, whois.ripe.net, by just using telnet and connecting
to port 43 and then typing in their options and search keys, but as
I have learned, the results in that case are entirely sub-optimal.

If you do this, you will get a "stairstep" set of output lines, apparently
because the output of whois.ripe.net, like most other WHOIS servers,
assumes that ends-of-lines should be represented by just <LF> and not
by the <CR><LF> sequence that is formally required for most other
protocols.  (The latter is fine for UNIX and UNIX-like systems, while
the former is generally needed for Windows systems.)

The original RFCs covering WHOIS (RFC 812 and RFC 954) were rather
entirely ambiguous about how response lines should be terminated,
however the newer RFC 3912, Section 3, strongly hints that response
lines should be terminated with <CR><LF> even though it fails to ever
come out and say that explicitly.

So, is the whois.ripe.net WHOIS server failing to be standard confoming?

Regardless of whether it is or isn't I really do need a WHOIS client
that I can give to my various Windows-only friends.

Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated.


Regards,
rfg