Find the process running on a port on your mac

Sometimes you just wanna kill an old process thats still listening on a port.

** TLDR: Here’s a one liner to find and kill a process on a given port (in the below example, port = 8080) if you already know what that process is **

lsof -n -i4TCP:8080 | grep LISTEN | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

Breakown of the commands

Get the process id or PID of the process running a port on your mac by running either of the following commands. Replace $PORT with the port you wish to examine.

lsof -n -i4TCP:$PORT | grep LISTEN
lsof -n -iTCP:$PORT | grep LISTEN
lsof -n -i:$PORT | grep LISTEN

Once you have the PID, you probably want to know the process corresponding to the PID, just in case you are the curious kind.

ps -a $PID

If you then need to kill that process

kill -9 $PID



Ryan Sukale


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