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I'm looking to bind to a port for SSH tunnelling via a simple shell script (likely: BASH), and I'd like a more ... "sane" manner of testing whether or not the port is already bound to another process, and I'd rather not like to grok (read: grep) the output of netstat.

Is there some command or utility that makes doing this sane? I either have terrible google-fu and a terrible vocabulary, or most people don't try to iterate over ports programmatically via a shell, but instead via a programming language.

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A bit less heavy than netstat, though still same concept: fuser <port>/tcp. – Max Alginin Nov 5 '09 at 1:50
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you could use lsof:

*-i i select by IPv[46] address: [46][proto][@host|addr][:svc_list|port_list]*

lsof -i 4TCP@0.0.0.0:80
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You were a few seconds ahead of me :) – Alex Nov 5 '09 at 2:59
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While lsof works, looping through every process and it's open ports is slow. netstat -tan will give you the list of open ports. – David Nov 5 '09 at 3:42
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up vote 2 down vote

Another option would be lsof. You can do something like:

lsof -i tcp:<port> -s tcp:listen
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