Kill a Process by Looking up the Port being used by it from a .BAT

Question

In Windows what can look for port 8080 and try to kill the process it is using through a .BAT file?

Solution 1

Here's a command to get you started:

FOR /F "tokens=4 delims= " %%P IN ('netstat -a -n -o ^| findstr :8080') DO @ECHO TaskKill.exe /PID %%P

When you're confident in your batch file, remove @ECHO.

FOR /F "tokens=4 delims= " %%P IN ('netstat -a -n -o ^| findstr :8080') DO TaskKill.exe /PID %%P

Note that you might need to change this slightly for different OS's. For example, on Windows 7 you might need tokens=5 instead of tokens=4.

How this works

FOR /F ... %variable IN ('command') DO otherCommand %variable...

This lets you execute command, and loop over its output. Each line will be stuffed into %variable, and can be expanded out in otherCommand as many times as you like, wherever you like. %variable in actual use can only have a single-letter name, e.g. %V.

"tokens=4 delims= "

This lets you split up each line by whitespace, and take the 4th chunk in that line, and stuffs it into %variable (in our case, %%P). delims looks empty, but that extra space is actually significant.

netstat -a -n -o

Just run it and find out. According to the command line help, it "Displays all connections and listening ports.", "Displays addresses and port numbers in numerical form.", and "Displays the owning process ID associated with each connection.". I just used these options since someone else suggested it, and it happened to work :)

^|

This takes the output of the first command or program (netstat) and passes it onto a second command program (findstr). If you were using this directly on the command line, instead of inside a command string, you would use | instead of ^|.

findstr :8080

This filters any output that is passed into it, returning only lines that contain :8080.

TaskKill.exe /PID <value>

This kills a running task, using the process ID.

%%P instead of %P

This is required in batch files. If you did this on the command prompt, you would use %P instead.

Solution 2

Open command prompt and run the following commands

 C:\Users\username>netstat -o -n -a | findstr 0.0:3000
   TCP    0.0.0.0:3000      0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       3116

C:\Users\username>taskkill /F /PID 3116

, here 3116 is the process ID

Solution 3

To find specific process on command line use below command here 8080 is port used by process

netstat -ano | findstr 8080

to kill process use below command here 21424 is process id

taskkill /pid 21424 /F 

Solution 4

Using Merlyn's solution caused other applications to be killed like firefox. These processes were using the same port, but not as a listener:

eg:

netstat -a -n -o | findstr :8085
  TCP    0.0.0.0:8085           0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       6568
  TCP    127.0.0.1:49616        127.0.0.1:8085         TIME_WAIT       0
  TCP    127.0.0.1:49618        127.0.0.1:8085         TIME_WAIT       0

Therefore, can excluded these by adding "LISTENING" to the findstr as follows:

FOR /F "tokens=5 delims= " %%P IN ('netstat -a -n -o ^| findstr :8085.*LISTENING') DO TaskKill.exe /PID %%P

Solution 5

To list all the process running on port 8080 do the following.

netstat -ano | find "8080"

TCP    0.0.0.0:8080           0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       10612

TCP    [::]:8080              [::]:0                 LISTENING       10612

Then to kill the process run the following command

taskkill /F /PID 10612

View more solutions

Comments

[Merlyn Morgan-Graham]

You may need to play with tokens, delims, etc. Check HELP FOR on the command line to see a lot of other options that FOR will give you, and check netstat -?, findstr /?, and TaskKill /? for even more help.

[Mike Flynn]

I will try it out and get back to you.

[Mike Flynn]

FOR /F "tokens=5 delims= " %%P IN ('netstat -a -n -o ^| findstr :8080') DO TaskKill.exe /F /PID %%P

[Merlyn Morgan-Graham]

@Mike: Weird. tokens=4 works for me and 5 doesn't. I am thinking there is system or environment dependent stuff going on here, so be sure to watch out for that.

[Strelok]

This is great. tokens=4 is Windows XP I think and tokens=5 Windows 7. Also a good idea to /F force the kill.

[Mohsin Javed Cheema]

you helped solving my problem too, thanks for really taking time to describe each of the step. two thumbs up.

[javatar]

For windows server 2008, you should set tokens=5 to get the PID

[Dinesh Kumar P]

Hi, What is the token to be set for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1?

[Dinesh Kumar P]

For Windows 8, tokens=5

[Sebastien Dionne]

I had to run two commands : FOR /F "tokens=5 delims= " %P IN ('netstat -a -n -o ^| findstr :8080') DO TaskKill.exe /PID %P /t /f and FOR /F "tokens=5 delims= " %P IN ('netstat -a -n -o ^| findstr :8080') DO TaskKill.exe /PID %P /f The parent were never really killed

[nishantv]

@MerlynMorgan-Graham when I am trying this command I am getting an error - 'netstat -a -n -o ^| findstr :8080' is not recognized as an internal or external command. Here is what i have tried to troubleshoot: (1) The command netstat -a -n -o ^| findstr :8080 gives the result (2) I have tried replacing single quote ' with a backtick ` , but that doesn't seem to work as well. Could you please tell me what could be the problem. I am running the command on windows 7 cmd.exe

[Merlyn Morgan-Graham]

@nishantv: Back tick isn't a Windows thing, so it of course won't work. Try typing netstat and try typing findstr separately. If either of them don't work you've found your culprit. Either way, I have no idea why you don't have such executables on your box - those, as far as I know, come with Windows. You'd need to google or ask a separate question on super user to solve such a problem. If both of them work, then you either have some sort of strange escaping options configured on your terminal/prompt (enable delayed expansion? I'm not sure here) or you have a typo in your command somewhere

[Mohit Singh]

yeah that will differ everywhere

[Leeeeeeelo]

very useful ! Mind you I search for :3000 instead of 0.0:3000 because it could under 127.0.01 instead of 0.0.0.0

[bahrep]

This is not really a PowerShell script, but a PowerShell-based wrapper around netstat tool.

[danjah]

Thank you, great job killing an out of control webpack dev task :)

[Hooli]

Cannot run program "FOR": CreateProcess error=2, The system cannot find the file specified

[Merlyn Morgan-Graham]

@Hooli This is not a typical error to have inside a DOS Batch file. You may want to open a separate question.

[Girdhar Singh Rathore]

@EralpB Enjoy :)

[Mohit Singh]

Or you may simply provide netstat -ano | findstr :9797 taskkill /PID typeyourPIDhere /F Here 9797 is the port number, iI frequently use this command to kill the misbehaving/hanged server.

[Sireesh Yarlagadda]

@TusharPandey This is windows tagged question , so it is a windows script, not shell script

[IAmSurajBobade]

@MerlynMorgan-Graham as this is an accepted answer, please consider adding points from stackoverflow.com/a/20637662/5243762 this answer as well

[saurabh.in]

I had to remove %%P with %P or else was gettin this error: "%%P was unexpected at this time."

[Merlyn Morgan-Graham]

@saurabh.in I already stated this at the very bottom of my answer, so make sure to read the entire answer before commenting.

[Jakob]

This is dependent on the language of the OS, any way to make it work for all languages?

[Eduard Florinescu]

@Jakob This can only be run in cmd terminal in Windows, also only in .cmd or .bat files

[Jakob]

Yes, but only in english language, since otherwise "LISTENING" will be translated to the language of the OS.

[Eduard Florinescu]

@Jakob I am not aware that netstat tool is translated to other languages

[Nikola Lukic]

I got %%P was unexpected at this time. Any suggestion ?

[Nikola Lukic]

Works fine on windows 10 !