Ask HN: how to get a list of domain names?

If you register with Verisign, you can download the .com and .net zone files: http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and-services/domai...

Zone files are definitely the way to go.

I wrote a blog post about how to generate possible domain names and check if they are registered. I generated 20k available domain names http://rawsyntax.com/post/4839370351/20337-available-alliter...

I don't know about all, but Alexa publishes a list of the top 1 million domains: http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip

You may find this interesting http://www.nominet.org.uk/tech/hostcount/ It doesn't have the data you need but the approach would be he same

Would the pattern searches on http://domainnamesoup.com work for you?

I've heard talk about downloading a zone file, but not sure what it looks like / how to actually get it.