What does the -tulpn option mean for netstat?
For finding out which ports of the machine are being opening by which services, I used:
netstat -tulpn
I checked the man
page for netstat
command, but I found nothing about this option. What's the meaning of the -tulpn
option?
As answered in https://serverfault.com/questions/387935/whats-the-difference-betwen-the-single-dash-and-double-dash-flags-on-shell-comm, in a Linux command line;
A single hyphen can be followed by multiple single-character flags.
A double hyphen prefixes a single multi-character option.
If you look at netstat man page, you will see that (Note that, netstat -tulpn
is equivalent to netstat -t -u -l -p -n
):
--tcp|-t
--udp|-u
-l, --listening
Show only listening sockets. (These are omitted by default.)
-p, --program
Show the PID and name of the program to which each socket belongs.
--numeric, -n
Show numerical addresses instead of trying to determine symbolic host, port or user names.
So, your command is equivalent to the following long form also:
netstat --tcp --udp --listening --program --numeric
In addition to man netstat
you can type info netstat
to get a shorter summary and longer explanation:
NETSTAT(8) Linux Programmer's Manual NETSTAT(8)
NAME
netstat - Print network connections, routing tables, interface statistics, mas‐
querade connections, and multicast memberships
SYNOPSIS
netstat [address_family_options] [--tcp|-t] [--udp|-u] [--raw|-w] [--listening|-l]
[--all|-a] [--numeric|-n] [--numeric-hosts] [--numeric-ports] [--numeric-users]
[--symbolic|-N] [--extend|-e[--extend|-e]] [--timers|-o] [--program|-p] [--ver‐
bose|-v] [--continuous|-c]
For -t -u -l -p -n
above you see --tcp
, --udp
, --listen
, --program
and --numeric
without having to scroll.
Scrolling down you can see verbose explanations.