Lately I wasn’t able to startup an application cause the port needed was already used by another process.

An istance of the process I was attempting to run resulted to be idle, but it wasn’t really straight forward to identify that process by executing the command

ps -ef | grep ...

I have found useful a script that I have found in internet and that I have used in the following way.

1. First of all, create a shell script file

vi which_pid_is_bounded_to_port.sh

2. Then type in the following script and save

#!/bin/ksh

line='---------------------------------------------'
pids=$(/usr/bin/ps -ef -o pid=)

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
read ans?"Enter port you would like to know pid for: "
else
ans=$1
fi

for f in $pids
do
/usr/proc/bin/pfiles $f 2>/dev/null | /usr/xpg4/bin/grep -q "port: $ans"
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
echo $line
echo "Port: $ans is being used by PID:\c"
pargs -l $f
#/usr/bin/ps -o pid,args -p $f
fi
done

3. Now you can run the script and prompt the port in order to find the pid is bound to

. ./which_pid_is_bounded_to_port.sh
Enter port you would like to know pid for: 8080

4. You will get an output that looks like the following:

---------------------------------------------
Port: 8080 is being used by PID:/usr/server/http

5. If you haven’t got the PID in the previous step, you can obtain it with the following:

ps -ef | grep /usr/server/http
user   585 15735   0 16:49:43 pts/12      0:00 grep /usr/server/http
user 17018 13104   0 15:57:44 pts/12      0:25 /usr/server/http

Once you get the PID, you can kill the process if you need it.

kill -9 17018