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Comment by jb775 | Hacker News Reader

I'm also curious how people actually go about purchasing domains immediately after expiring. Like for example when Trump bought jebbush.com during primary season because it happened to expire then (and he temporarily re-routed it to his own site lol)...They must have done something more technical to lock it in, does anyone know?

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Some registrars do offer the ability to "pre-order", waiting until a domain has expired and then snapping it up.

I own steve.org.uk, and after moving to Finland I noticed steve.fi was going to expire in the near-future. So I setup a cron-job that would text me the moment it became free.

First of all it went from registered to being in the redemption state, then it became generally available. I managed to register it once I'd woken up - though competition was less than I'd otherwise expect because at the time you needed to have a Finnish identity-number to register Finnish domains. I suspect that is no longer true.

Would you mind sharing your the script of your cron-job?

This was a couple of years ago, but it was something like:

    whois steve.fi  | ( grep "Domain not found" && echo "DOMAIN IS NOT REGISTERED - GET IT NOW!" )

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