How to find open ports in your PC?

Everybody knows port is nothing but a communication channel that is used to pass information between computers and has got an associated port number. Can I call it as a logical connection point ? Every application in your computer or laptop will occupy will make use of a particular port in your system. Ports and Port numbers are mostly used in programming sockets and the range of port numbers can vary from 0 to 65535. For eg) all HTTP connections use port 80. Lets not go deep into that subject. Here I am going to tell you about some utility that gives you information about open ports in your PC, its associated process name, protocol, process path etc. The tool is called CurrPorts.



I believe this utility or tool whatever you call it, is a really handy one for programmers who do socket programming. Even as a J2EE developer I have encountered scenarios or errors like ‘Port Already In Use’ lot of times. This utility will ease up the scenario by helping us to find which application is currently occupying that port. You can use this tool to kill a particular process that is using a particular port to open up the same for your own purpose. This tool can be used to generate reports in network servers about port usage. Probably programmers should give it a try!