How to kill a process by port on MacOS, a la fuser -k 9000/tcp

Question

On linux I can kill a process knowing only the port it is listening on using fuser -k 9000/tcp, how do I so the same on MacOS?

Answer 1

lsof -P | grep ':PortNumber' | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

Change PortNumber to the actual port you want to search for.

Answer 2

Adding the -t and -i flags to lsof should speed it up even more by removing the need for grep and awk.

lsof -nti:NumberOfPort | xargs kill -9

lsof arguments:

• -n Avoids host names lookup (may result in faster performance)
• -t Terse output; returns process IDs only to facilitate piping the output to kill
• -i Selects only those files whose Internet address matches

kill arguments:

• -9 Non-catchable, non-ignorable kill

Answer 3

You can see if a port if open by this command

 sudo lsof -i :8000

where 8000 is the port number

If the port is open, it should return a string containing the Process ID (PID).

Copy this PID and

kill -9 PID

If you need to see all the open ports, you can perform a Port Scan in the Network Utility application.

Answer 4

Add -n to lsof and you remove the reverse DNS lookup from the command and reduce the run time from minutes to seconds.

lsof -Pn | grep ':NumberOfPort' | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

Answer 5

1. Check your port is open or not by

sudo lsof -i : {PORT_NUMBER}

COMMAND PID     USER   FD   TYPE             DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
java    582 Thirumal  300u  IPv6 0xf91b63da8f10f8b7      0t0  TCP *:distinct (LISTEN)

2. Close the port by killing process PID

sudo kill -9 582

Answer 6

You can use kill -9 $(lsof -i:PORT -t) 2> /dev/null, where PORT is your actual port number. It will kill the process which is running on your given port.

Answer 7

If you prefer to have tool with a GUI, you can use: https://github.com/ayedo/tcpkiller