Rohan Shewale's Blog

Kill a process

February 01, 2025 | 1 Minute Read

When you accidentally close a terminal but the process is still running and blocking a port, you can kill it with this command.

First get a list of process and search for listening ports

lsof -i -P | grep LISTEN

it should result in something like this

ControlCe   580 rohan   11u  IPv6 0xbc8fe00eaebc28f5      0t0  TCP *:5000 (LISTEN)
rapportd    628 rohan    8u  IPv4 0x84238893ff3ee7e0      0t0  TCP *:63947 (LISTEN)
rapportd    628 rohan    9u  IPv6 0x745bde29f20d42ef      0t0  TCP *:63947 (LISTEN)
ruby      52285 rohan    6u  IPv4 0xf1f440be40da1e31      0t0  TCP localhost:4000 (LISTEN)
Electron  61686 rohan   47u  IPv4  0x56192f19875a781      0t0  TCP localhost:62587 (LISTEN)
manager   61722 rohan   29u  IPv4 0x7c6940291f97d1cc      0t0  TCP localhost:51000 (LISTEN)
ckg_serve 61734 rohan    9u  IPv4 0xcdabc1daa657b77e      0t0  TCP localhost:51010 (LISTEN)
node      83664 rohan   20u  IPv6 0xf5ea5fc66cb80dd1      0t0  TCP *:3000 (LISTEN)
node      83665 rohan   20u  IPv6 0xe1798e7c005a7103      0t0  TCP *:3002 (LISTEN)

which is of the format

COMMAND     PID  USER   FD   TYPE  DEVICE         SIZE/OFF      NODE NAME

now you can select the process by it’s PID and terminate with kill -9 <PID> (is same as kill -KILL <PID>)

e.g. if I want to free up my port 3002

kill -9 83665

kill -9 <PID> sends the “kill” signal which cannot be caught or ignored. The process will be forcibly shut down with no notification to the process, and no chance to do any cleanup what so ever.

PS: you might have to use sudo if the process is running in elevated privilege.

© 2025 Rohan S. Shewale