Celeb Glow
news | March 11, 2026

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

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?

7 Answers

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

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

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
2

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.

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
  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

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.

1

If you prefer to have tool with a GUI, you can use:

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Sign up using Google Sign up using Facebook Sign up using Email and Password

Post as a guest

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy