world manpage

Where in the world is…?

Author:

Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org>

Date:

2025-09-10

Copyright:

2013-2025 Barry Warsaw

Version:

5.2

Manual section:

1

SYNOPSYS

world [options] [tld, [tld, …]]

DESCRIPTION

This script takes a list of Internet top-level domain names and prints out where in the world those domains originate from.

EXIT STATUS

This script exits with the following values:

0   if all given codes were resolved.
N>0 where N is the number of given arguments that were not resolved.

EXAMPLES

Look up top-level domains:

$ world tz us
tz originates from Tanzania, United Republic of
us originates from United States of America (the)

Reverse look ups are also supported.

$ world -r united
Matches for "united":
  ae: United Arab Emirates (the)
  gb: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the)
  tz: Tanzania, United Republic of
  uk: United Kingdom (common practice)
  um: United States Minor Outlying Islands (the)
  us: United States of America (the)

Only two-letter country codes are supported, since these are the only ones that were freely available from the ISO 3166 standard. As of 2015-01-09, even these are no longer available in machine readable form.

This script also knows about many non-geographic, generic, USA-centric, historical, common usage, and reserved top-level domains.

OPTIONS

Querying

-r, --reverse

Do a reverse lookup. In this mode, the arguments can be any Python regular expression; these are matched against all TLD descriptions (e.g. country names) and a list of matches is printed.

-a, --all

Print the mapping of all top-level domains.

Other

-h, --help

show this help message and exit

--version

show program’s version number and exit

With no top-level domains given, help is printed.