Get a list of Open Ports in Linux

netstat -lntu

as replied by @askmish will give you list of services running on your system on tcp and udp ports where

  • -l = only services which are listening on some port
  • -n = show port number, don't try to resolve the service name
  • -t = tcp ports
  • -u = udp ports
  • -p = name of the program

You don't need the 'p' parameter as you're only interested in getting which ports are free and not which program is running on it.

This only shows which ports on your system are used up, though. This doesn't tell you the status of your network e.g. if you're behind NAT and you want some services to be accessible from outside. Or if the firewall is blocking the port for outside visitors. In that case, nmap comes to the rescue. WARNING: Use nmap only on networks which are under your control. Also, there are firewall rules which can block nmap pings, you'll have to fiddle around with options to get correct results.


Since net-tools is deprecated, you can use the ss command instead of netstat if netstat is not present on your machine:

ss -lntu

should work similarly to

netstat -lntu

according to the built-in help:

-n, --numeric       don't resolve service names
-l, --listening     display listening sockets
-t, --tcp           display only TCP sockets
-u, --udp           display only UDP sockets

This command will list open network ports and the processes that own them:

netstat -lnptu

you can thereafter filter the results to your exact specs.

You could also use nmap for more granular results about ports.

Tags:

Linux

Ports