Get ONLY PIDs for processes listening on a port

The lsof utility on Linux is useful among other things for checking which process is listening on a specific port.

If you need to kill all processes listening on a particular port, normally you would reach for something like awk '{ print $2 }', but that would fail to remove the PID column header, so you would also need to pipe through tail -1. It get pretty verbose for something that should be pretty simple.

Fortunatly, lsof provides a way to list all the pids without the PID header specifically so you can pipe the output to the kill command.

The -t flag removes everything from the output except the pids of the resulting processes from your query.

In this example I used a query to return all processes listening on port 3000 and return their PID:

lsof -ti tcp:3000

The output of which will look something like:

6540
6543
21715

This is perfect for piping into kill using xargs:

lsof -ti tcp:3000 | xargs kill

No awks or tails necessary! 🐕