Linux - kill process listening on specific port

In this short article, we would like to show how to kill process that listens on a specific port in Linux.

Quick solution:

kill -9 $(lsof -t -i:8080 -sTCP:LISTEN)

Where: 8080 is a number of used port by a process that we want to kill.

How does it work?

lsof part:

• lsof returns details of opened files - in Linux common politics is to represent all things by files,
• we want to get only PID, so -t parameter is useful to do it - returning only process ID (PID),
• with -i:8080 we are able to find information about processes that use 8080 port,
• with -sTCP:LISTEN we will check only listening TCP sockets.

kill part:

• kill program stops process on kernel level (because of -9 parameter) using PID from lsof command.

More safe way example

Alternatively, for save we can do all steps manually to be sure that the proper program was killed.

Simple steps:

1. display processes that use port 8080,
   Command:

   lsof -w -i:8080

   Output:

   COMMAND   PID  USER  FD   TYPE  DEVICE  SIZE/OFF  NODE NAME
   node    16908  john  21u  IPv4  220968       0t0  TCP *:8080 (LISTEN)

2. kill the selected process (in out case it is PID 16908 with (LISTEN) note),
   Command:

   kill -9 16908

   Output:

   Killed