Open ports
When doing a lot of socket programming, it often happens that a server program when recompiled/rerun fails to bind to a particular port number because that port number is already in use.
To close the port number manually first the process name/id has to be found out that is holding the port open and then use the kill command on that process.
lsof
$ lsof -i :8888 COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME java 8461 enlightened 11u IPv6 138527 0t0 UDP *:8888
In the above example it is seen that port 8888 is being held in use by the command java with pid 8461.
Now kill the process by doing any of the following
$ kill 8461 $ killall -9 8461 $ killall -9 java
netstat
The netstat command can also be used to find out which process is holding a certain port number
$ netstat -u -ap (Not all processes could be identified, non-owned process info will not be shown, you would have to be root to see it all.) Active Internet connections (servers and established) Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State PID/Program name udp 0 0 *:18347 *:* - udp 0 0 localhost:11211 *:* - udp 0 0 localhost:36254 localhost:36254 ESTABLISHED - udp 0 0 localhost:domain *:* - udp 0 0 *:ipp *:* - udp 0 0 *:42038 *:* - udp 0 0 *:17500 *:* 4090/dropbox udp 0 0 *:mdns *:* - udp 0 0 localhost:58797 localhost:7777 ESTABLISHED 9831/ncat udp 0 0 localhost:42724 localhost:domain ESTABLISHED - udp6 0 0 [::]:46282 [::]:* - udp6 0 0 [::]:mdns [::]:* - udp6 0 0 [::]:9999 [::]:* 11598/java
The port we want to close here is 9999. And netstat shows that the pid = 11598 and command name = java
Over here we used the -u for udp port. If its a tcp port then the u switch is not needed.
$ sudo netstat -ap | grep :9050 tcp 0 0 localhost:9050 *:* LISTEN 1613/tor
Once the process id/name is found end it with the kill command.
$ kill 11598
fuser
The fuser command can also be used to find out the pid of the program. The sytanx is
fuser -k -n protocol portno
Quick example
$ fuser -k -n udp 7777 7777/udp: 11774
