dvikan.no

Let's go for domain treasure hunting!

2013-06-28

Treasure (from Greek θησαυρός – thēsauros, meaning “treasure store”,[2] romanized as thesaurus) is a concentration of riches, often one which is considered lost or forgotten until being rediscovered.

The country Iceland has the top level domain .is. I want to find cool domain names such that the second level domain and the top level domain .is forms a word. An example is meningit.is. So I went and grabbed a Norwegian wordlist:

$ wget https://scandinavian-keyboard.googlecode.com/files/norwegian.txt

Convert to unix line endings;

$ dos2unix norwegian.txt

Convert to utf8:

$ iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf8 norwegian.txt > norwegian.utf.txt

Now the file is greppable and I want to find words ending with is:

$ grep is$ norwegian.utf.txt > words.txt

Add dot right before the is to form domain names:

#!/bin/bash

for word in $(cat words.txt);do
    length=${#word}
    echo "${word:0:(($length-2))}.is" >> domains.txt
done

Now I have a list of possible domain names, some of which are registered and some are not. Next I have to whois each domain and see which one is available. For this the whois tool is useful. I grep for No entries found and check the exit status:

#!/bin/bash

for domain in $(cat domains.txt);do
    whois "$domain" | grep -q "No entries found"

    if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
        :
    else
        echo "$domain" >> available_is_domains.txt
    fi
done

And now the file available_is_domains.txt contains a list of available cool domains! Some of the more interesting are antarkt.is, pres.is, praks.is and syfil.is. They are not cool if you dont understand Norwegian.