reverse.sh is a free Bash script that, like all good Unix utilities, does one thing

Purpose: Give it a phone number, it will do a reverse lookup on that number and give you the name and address of either the person or business it is associated with.

That’s it.

NOTE: the script won’t work without a free API key that you need to get (see below).

Why this is important is that I’ve been trying to do this for years, and always ended up content scraping, which is a horribly ineffective, error-prone, and easy to break way of getting this information.

Have you ever tried to find a reverse lookup that isn’t loaded down with ads? Good luck.

Well, I finally found the answer.

Whitepages.com has a free API which they just opened up a few months ago. I went in, got an API key, and voilà!

I would really very much like to be able to make an iPhone-friendly web page that would do the same thing, but I’m not sure how to do that yet. Other than an attribution to WhitePages.com the page would be ad-free. I’m surprised such a thing apparently doesn’t exist over a year after the iPhone was introduced.