>>4
I should have said (and should have replied earlier), that I'm not concerned about the script end of it, I'm thinking of the actual space required for the text of the whois information. I already have 2 computers running Linux, just neither of them has that much free disk space.
With 73 million .com/.org/.net domains, when you consider that the average amount of information in a whois is about 2KB, if it were stored in plain text, we have 150 GB of plain text. So even if I were to compress the data in a database, with propper indexing to search, we are still talking 80 GBs, which would be more of a pain to search through the first time, but more efficient in the long run than just grep.
So really, since I was really more interested in just one address for now, time wise, it would be better as plain text, however, as said, I don't have nearly that much free disk space.