3 Ways to Find Out Which Process Listening on a Particular Port

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A port is a logical entity that represents an endpoint of communication and is associated with a given process or service in an operating system. In this short guide, we will show different ways of finding the process/service listening on a particular port in Linux.

1. Using netstat Command

netstat (network statistics) command is used to display information concerning network connections, routing tables, interface stats, and beyond. It is available on all Unix-like operating systems including Linux and also on Windows OS.

In case you do not have it installed by default, use the following command to install it.

$ sudo apt-get install net-tools    [On Debian/Ubuntu & Mint] 
$ sudo dnf install net-tools        [On CentOS/RHEL/Fedora and Rocky Linux/AlmaLinux]

Once installed, you can use it with the grep command to find the process or service listening on a particular port in Linux as follows (specify the port).

$ netstat -ltnp | grep -w ':80' 

In the above command, the flags.

  • l – tells netstat to only show listening sockets.
  • t – tells it to display tcp connections.
  • n – instructs it to show numerical addresses.
  • p – enables showing of the process ID and the process name.
  • grep -w – shows matching of exact string (:80).

2. Using lsof Command

lsof command (List Open Files) is used to list all open files on a Linux system. To install it on your system, type the command below.

$ sudo apt-get install lsof     [On Debian, Ubuntu and Mint]
$ sudo yum install lsof         [On RHEL/CentOS/Fedora and Rocky Linux/AlmaLinux] 

To find the process/service listening on a particular port, type (specify the port).

$ lsof -i :80

3. Using fuser Command

fuser command shows the PIDs of processes using the specified files or file systems in Linux.

You can install it as follows:

$ sudo apt-get install psmisc     [On Debian, Ubuntu]
$ sudo yum install psmisc         [On RHEL/CentOS/Fedora and Rocky Linux/AlmaLinux]

You can find the process/service listening on a particular port by running the command below (specify the port).

$ fuser 80/tcp

Then find the process name using PID number with the ps command like so.

$ ps -p 2053 -o comm=
$ ps -p 2381 -o comm=

That’s all!

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