to check if port is open.

Step 3: Locate to the target port and view the corresponding PID in the final column. For example, the PID of port 2179 is 3800.

Step 4: Input tasklist|findstr “3800” and hit Enter on the keyboard to view which service takes up the port.

Step 5: To end up this service, run taskkill /f /t /im vmms.exe.

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How to find out which ports are used by a program?

I try to figure out which ports a specific program uses if they send data to the internet. Is there a tool which is able to find this out? Or do I have to do package inspection by using wireshark?

Background: I try to create a priority rule on my fritz!box 7490 router, so that some computer games are seen as real-time applications and there are as less lags as possible e.g. if someone in the network decides to watch videos on youtube while I am playing online.

3 Answers 3

Determine PID of your program

Check ports in third column of output from

• there is a space before PID to rule out inappropriate matches potentially coming from other columns (a little trick)
• /n keeps addresses in numeric form (without resolving) what causes the command to finish without delays (it should suffice for what you need)

If you are using windows you can use the free utility «Process Explorer» for this — among many other things. You have to run it in Administrator mode though.

If you are wanting to optimize something like a game or netflix streaming, then you don’t need to worry about the port on your computer — that is the client, and is (somewhat) randomly chosen from the higher range of ports. What you want is to find out what port(s) the service you are connecting to is provided on, and optimize connections to those ports from your machine (possibly by MAC address? or local lan ip)

How to Check for Ports in Use in Windows 10

At any one time, there’s a whole bunch of information being sent between your Windows 10 PC and the endless void of the Internet. This is done using a process whereby network-dependent processes seek out TCP and UDP ports, which they use to communicate with the Internet. First, your data gets sent to remote ports at the destination or website your processes are trying to connect to, then it gets received at local ports back on your PC.

Most of the time, Windows 10 knows how to manage ports and ensure that traffic is being directed through the right ports so that those processes can connect with what they need to. But sometimes two processes may be assigned to one port, or maybe you just want to get a better picture of your network traffic and what’s going in and out.

That’s why wrote this guide that shows you how to get an overview of your ports and see which applications are using which ports.

Use Nirsoft CurrPorts

NirSoft is one of the best indie software developers, giving us great utilities, like PassView and WirelessKeyView. While some people will prefer checking their ports without installing third-party software (in which case, scroll down to the CMD method), CurrPorts is easily the fastest and most convenient way to view your ports.

Once you’ve installed CurrPorts, just open it to see a list of all your ports currently in use. If you’re looking for local ports in use, just click the “Local Port” column at the top to order the list by port number (handy if you’re looking for a specific one). You can do the same thing with remote ports, too.

If you want to really find specific ports, click the “Advanced Filters” icon at the top and enter your string in the format they suggest. It should look something like the below image.

Hit OK when you’re ready, and the list will filter down to your queries.

Command Prompt Method

The integrated – though not necessarily the simplest – way to check open ports is to use the trusty command prompt.

Click the Start button, type cmd , then right-click “Command Prompt” when it shows up in the search results. Click “Run as administrator.”

Once you’re in the elevated command prompt, enter the following command:

This will steadily bring up a list of ports that is probably quite long, along with the Windows processes that are using them. (You can press Ctrl + A , then Ctrl + C to copy all information to the clipboard.) On the average PC, there will be two main local IP addresses that contain ports on your PC.

The first, in our case, is “127.0.0.1.” This IP address is otherwise known as “localhost” or a “loopback address,” and any process listening to ports here is communicating internally on your local network without using any network interface. The actual port is the number you see after the colon. (See image below.)

The bulk of your processes will probably be listening to ports prefixed with “192.168.xxx.xxx,” which is your IP address. This means the processes you see listed here are listening for communications from remote Internet locations (such as websites). Again, the port number is the number after the colon.

TCPView

If you don’t mind installing a third-party app and want to have more control over what’s going on with all your ports, you can use a lightweight app called TCPView. This immediately brings up a list of processes and their associated ports.

What make this better than the command prompt is that you can actively see the ports opening, closing and sending packets. Just look for the green, red and yellow highlights. You can also reorder the list by clicking the column headings, making it easier to find the process you want or two separate processes vying for the same port.

If you do find a process or connection you want to close, just right-click that process. You can then select “End process,” which is exactly the same function as the one in Windows task manager. Or you can click “Close Connection” to leave the process open but stop it from listening on a given port.

If you’re having some trouble in Windows 10, then see whether a Windows update may be causing it. We also have a handy guide for managing the health of your hard drive in Windows 10.

Related:

Content Manager at Make Tech Easier. Enjoys Android, Windows, and tinkering with retro console emulation to breaking point.

Command line for looking at specific port

Is there a way to examine the status of a specific port from the Windows command line? I know I can use netstat to examine all ports but netstat is slow and looking at a specific port probably isn’t.

14 Answers 14

Here is the easy solution of port finding.

You can use the netstat combined with the -np flags and a pipe to the find or findstr commands.

Basic Usage is as such:

So for example to check port 80 on TCP, you can do this: netstat -np TCP | find «80» Which ends up giving the following kind of output:

As you can see, this only shows the connections on port 80 for the TCP protocol.

here o represents process ID. now you can do whatever with the process ID. To terminate the process, for e.g., use:

when I have problem with WAMP apache , I use this code for find which program is using port 80.

3068 is PID, so I can find it from task manager and stop that process.

As noted elsewhere: use netstat, with appropriate switches, and then filter the results with find[str]

To find a foreign port you could use:

To find a local port you might use:

Where N is the port number you are interested in.

-n ensures all ports will be numerical, i.e. not returned as translated to service names.

-a will ensure you search all connections (TCP, UDP, listening. )

In the find string you must include the colon, as the port qualifier, otherwise the number may match either local or foreign addresses.

You can further narrow narrow the search using other netstat switches as necessary.

Further reading (^0^)

it will give you number of sockets active on a specific IP and port(Server port number)

For Windows 8 User : Open Command Prompt, type netstat -an | find «your port number» , enter .

If reply comes like LISTENING then the port is in use, else it is free .

To find a foreign port (IPv4 or IPv6) you can use:

To find a local port (IPv4 or IPv6) you can use:

Where N is the port number you are interested in. The «/r» switch tells it to process it as regexp. The «/c» switch allows findstr to include spaces within search strings instead of treating a space as a search string delimiter. This added space prevents longer ports being mistreated — for example, «:80» vs «:8080» and other port munging issues.

To list remote connections to the local RDP server, for example:

Or to see who is touching your DNS:

If you want to exclude local-only ports you can use a series of exceptions with «/v» and escape characters with a backslash:

7 netstat Command Usage on Windows with Example

netstat is a command-line network tool that is a handy troubleshooting command. Its cross-platform utility means you can use it on Linux, macOS, or Windows.

netstat can be very handy in the following.

• Display incoming and outgoing network connections
• Display routing tables
• Display number of network interfaces
• Display network protocol statistics

Let’s get it started…

Show all connections

To start with netstat, let’s see the command that displays all connections.

Type the above command and hit enter. You will see all the active connections from different states as shown below.

You will see a header with Proto, Local Address, Foreign Address, and State. Let’s see brief info about them.

• Proto – defined the protocol type (TCP, UDP, etc. ) of the socket.
• Local Address – displays your computer IP address and port, local end of the socket.
• Foreign Address – displays remote computer that your computer is connected to, the remote end of the socket.
• State – defines the state of the socket (LISTENING, ESTABLISHED, CLOSE_WAIT, TIME_WAIT).

We can filter the connections in different ways. Let’s see them.

Show only established connection

We have seen the state in the connection information. You can use below syntax to view all established connections from/to your Windows server.

Note: to view LISTEN, CLOSE_WAIT, TIME_WAIT you can just use as follows.

To see the connections that are in LISTENING state change ESTABLISHED keyword in the previous command to LISTENING. You will get the information about connections that are in the listening state as follows.

Similarly, run the following command to see all the connections that are in CLOSE_WAIT state.

Finally, use the TIME_WAIT flag to get information about all the connections that are in TIME_WAIT state.

Show PID used by port number

Every connection is a process internally. And every process has an ID, and its called PID. We can see the PID of every socket connection using the following command.

The above command displays all the connections with PID. Let’s run the command and see how we get the result.

We got an extra column called PID. And its the process identifier.

A very handy when you have to find out which PID is using the particular port number.

You can see the following info if you use the above command.

Show statistics of all protocols

Useful when you have to find out for any received header error, received address error, discarded packet, etc. It will list out statistics from IPv4, IPv6, ICMPv4, ICMPv6, TCP, UDP, etc.

You will see the statistics of all protocols as shown below.

To find out any errors quickly you can use syntax.

The above command filters all the errors from statistics of all protocols.

Show routing information

To display Route Table, you can use the below syntax. The following syntax will also list all interfaces.

If you use the above command, then you see the info about routing as shown below.

Show Interface Statistics

To view the status of all interface, you can use the following syntax. This will display Received & Sent details.

Show Fully Qualified Domain Name of foreign address (remote host)

If you are tracking some issues and would like to know FQDN of the remote host, then you can use the following syntax.

If you run the above command, then you will see a similar result as follows.

Note: you can combine findstr syntax to show precise results like below.

The above command will filter the connections and displays only established connections. Let’s see an example.

We can filter the connections using the domain with the following command.

Specify the domain in the command and you will see the filtered connections as follows.

I hope this helps you get familiar with netstat command usage on Windows. If you are interested in learning Windows administration then I would suggest checking out this course.