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What is the command to display a list of open ports on a Debian server?

I tried netstat -a | egrep 'Proto|LISTEN' but I would like something more specific that actually lists the port number.

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5 Answers

up vote 22 down vote 
 netstat -pln

-l will list listening ports, -p will also display the process, -n will show port numbers instead of names. Add -t to only show TCP ports.

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3  
For the -p to work properly, you need to run this as root, so sudo netstat -tpln, otherwise the process column will not be particularly useful, unless you're the user whose process is listening on a given port. – cjc Feb 6 '12 at 18:21
up vote 8 down vote

lsof -i -P

Check the man page for lsof as there is no shortage of options. -P lists the port number rather than the name taken from /etc/services Run as root, though, this will provide you with a list of all active network connections and their status (listening, established, etc).

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up vote 6 down vote

You can do:

netstat -an | egrep 'Proto|LISTEN'

or simply:

netstat -anl

which will give you all listening sockets on the system.

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This would be the best solution (where "best" is defined as "works on the broadest range of systems" (BSD, Linux, AIX, Solaris, I believe HP-UX)) – voretaq7♦ Feb 6 '12 at 22:31
up vote 4 down vote

What almost everybody wants (TCP and UDP) is netstat -tunlp.

I use it every day, maybe every hour. The 'lsof' hack is more portable (works on Solaris too), but on Debian it's not an essential package, you have to install it.

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Yes, and run it via sudo. – Martijn Heemels Feb 7 '12 at 23:09
My friend taught me to remember this command with a flower name netstat -tulpen Flag e gives additional information. – Deele Dec 15 '12 at 14:37
up vote -1 down vote

TechRepulic has a decent article that you can find here. It has some similar commands as you listed above but also a few variations. I would also highly recommend using nmap to do a port scan of the computer in question so you can see from an external perspective what ports are open and listening.

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Could you please tell me why this was down voted? As I simply provided a link with a lot of the solutions above which were approved along with a different perspective of doing an external scan as well. Thanks. – Eric Feb 6 '12 at 19:10
3  
I didn't downvote, but on serverfault like most stack-exchange we generally expect you to to put the answer here, and not just a link to somewhere else. Links go away over time, but we want content on SF to still be valuable when the links die. – Zoredache Feb 6 '12 at 22:55

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