I'm in need of a script that I could run periodically (say, from cron) that would accept a list of domain names and identify those which are expiring. No, this isn't a claim-jumping application; this is an effort to protect our clients from claim-jumping where they (or their domain registration service) isn't clueful enough to do it. Obviously, some kind of query against "whois" is necessary. The trick is parsing the various and sundry formats returned. I'd do it myself, but I'd prefer to start with something that is at least partway there.

Querying my friend Google results in 2.5 million hits, which seem to be all about shareware or commercial software to implement claim-jumping ...