On 16 Mar 1998 mason@primenet.com.au wrote:

: 	Newer whois servers, probably based on the RIPE one, handle
: 	internally many different flags, eg.  -i, -m, -M, -a, etc.
: 	We should ignore any such options and pass them through.  The
: 	only one that we take notice of is   -h host  which must be the
: 	first option.

What's wrong with the getopt terminator `--'?:

  whois -h whois.ripe.net -- -m stuff...

That terminates argument parsing and passes the switches right on down the
line.

The reason I propose this workaround instead is because there may be, in the
future, a need to add options to the whois program.  An option to set the
port number.  An option to enable rwhois parsing.  In other words, whois
should use getopt to parse its arguments--you should just terminate them
with `--' when you want to define the difference between a whois program
option and a whois server option.  (Maybe this is best established as a
documentation change-request, to update the manpage to include this
situation.)

If this solves your problem, please say so and I'll close the PR. 
Otherwise, the topic is still open to discussion.... 

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)