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I want to see if something is listening on a port on localhost. I was going to use nc and check the exit code.

Something like this:

echo "" | nc localhost 14881
echo $?

Any other suggestions?

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79% accept rate
there are many reasons why you'd want to do this, but I'm curious as to your reason here... it may be possible you can avoid the port-check altogether. Do you have a 'slow start' scenario? where the application daemonizes but takes another minute or two before it actually opens up a listener? or are you just trying to avoid a lengthy timeout situation? or are you unable to handle the case where you get connection refused? – ericslaw Jul 6 '09 at 14:12
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4 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

lsof -i :14881

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This one provides lots of great data. – msanford Jul 6 '09 at 14:26
On my desktop system this one requires root. – Kyle Brandt♦ Jul 6 '09 at 14:58
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up vote 2 down vote

If you are root:

netstat -lnp | grep ':14881 '
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Just to be clear: it will still work if you aren't root but you won't benefit from seeing the process name bound to it. – Dan Carley Jul 6 '09 at 13:47
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up vote 2 down vote

Maybe netstat would be better because the port might not be listening on localhost or it might be blocked by iptables:

netstat -ln  | grep :14881
echo $?

Grep will exit with 1 if there is no match. If you want just tcp and/or udp , add the -u or -t switches to netstat.

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up vote 0 down vote

netstat -ano | egrep LISTEN | egrep tcp | egrep $PORTNUMBER

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Woah, lay off the pipes. You can replace the first two egreps with -lt instead of -ao and a normal grep on the port. Or, if you wished, perform everything as a single egrep. – Dan Carley Jul 6 '09 at 13:52
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