I regularly find myself trying to find the owner of a domain or needing other information, like authoritative name servers.  A few command line whois.exe programs exist out there for Windows, but the one I like best is the one by Mark Russinovich at Sysinternals.  You can visit the previous link to download or use wget http://download.sysinternals.com/files/WhoIs.zip at the command line (assuming you have wget for Windows.)

One little trick I like to do is place whois.exe in the Windows system32 directory (c:windowssystem32 for example), because this directory is normally in your system path.  This way whois can be executed in a command prompt from any directory.

Here’s a look at whois microsoft.com: