Freeing up a TCP/IP port?

Question

netstat -tulnap shows me what ports are in use. How to free up a port in Linux?

Answer 1

The "netstat --programs" command will give you the process information, assuming you're root. Then you will have to kill the "offending" process which may well start up again just to annoy you :-).

What are you actually trying to achieve here? Solutions will vary based on the processes holding those ports.

Answer 2

As the others have said, you'll have to kill all processes that are listening on that port. The easiest way to do that would be to use the fuser(1) command. For example, to see all of the processes listening for http requests on port 80 (run as root or use sudo):

# fuser 80/tcp

If you want to kill them, then just add the -k option.

Answer 3

sudo killall -9 "process name"

Answer 4

Shutting down the computer always kills the process for me.