How To'sLinux

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

We can use netstat, lsof, fuser tools to find out particular service running on Linux

Let’s find out which process is listening on a particular port. We’ll use three different ways to inspect and find the process/service listening on a particular port in Linux.

1. netstat

First, we’re going to use netstat which is used to display information regarding network conns, interface stats, and beyond. netstat comes pre-installed in Linux and also on Windows operating system.

$ sudo apt-get install net-tools [On Debian/Ubuntu & Mint]
$ sudo dnf install net-tools [On CentOS/RHEL/Fedora and Rocky Linux/AlmaLinux]
$ pacman -S netstat-nat [On Arch Linux]
$ emerge sys-apps/net-tools [On Gentoo]
$ sudo dnf install net-tools [On Fedora]
$ sudo zypper install net-tools [On openSUSE]

You can use netstat command to output every little details but along with netstat you can use grep to narrow down your specific thing which you’re looking for.

$ netstat -ltnp | grep -w ':443'

  • 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. lsof

Second, we can use lsof to filter out specific ports and find out which services are running behind the particular port.

To install on your Linux system:

$ sudo apt-get install lsof     [On Debian, Ubuntu and Mint]
$ sudo yum install lsof         [On RHEL/CentOS/Fedora and Rocky Linux/AlmaLinux]
$ sudo emerge -a sys-apps/lsof  [On Gentoo Linux]
$ sudo pacman -S lsof           [On Arch Linux]
$ sudo zypper install lsof      [On OpenSUSE]

To find the particular port you can use these arguments,

$ lsof -i :443

3. fuser

Lastly, we can use fuser, which will output PIDs of processes,

Let’s install fuser on Linux:

$ sudo apt-get install psmisc     [On Debian, Ubuntu and Mint]
$ sudo yum install psmisc         [On RHEL/CentOS/Fedora and Rocky Linux/AlmaLinux]
$ sudo emerge -a sys-apps/psmisc  [On Gentoo Linux]
$ sudo pacman -S psmisc           [On Arch Linux]
$ sudo zypper install psmisc      [On OpenSUSE]

To find out which service is running or listening on a particular port we can use this,

$ fuser 443/tcp


In case you want to inspect running process name using PID numbers you can use ps command,

$ ps -p 1337 -o comm=

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