What process is listening on a certain port on Solaris?

Question

So I log into a Solaris box, try to start Apache, and find that there is already a process listening on port 80, and it\'s not Apache. Our boxes don\'t have lsof installed,

Answer 1

netstat on Solaris will not tell you this, nor will older versions of lsof, but if you download and build/install a newer version of lsof, this can tell you that.

$ lsof -v
lsof version information:
    revision: 4.85
    latest revision: ftp://lsof.itap.purdue.edu/pub/tools/unix/lsof/
    latest FAQ: ftp://lsof.itap.purdue.edu/pub/tools/unix/lsof/FAQ
    latest man page: ftp://lsof.itap.purdue.edu/pub/tools/unix/lsof/lsof_man
    configuration info: 64 bit kernel
    constructed: Fri Mar 7 10:32:54 GMT 2014
    constructed by and on: user@hostname
    compiler: gcc
    compiler version: 3.4.3 (csl-sol210-3_4-branch+sol_rpath)
    8<- - - - ***SNIP*** - - -

With this you can use the -i option:

$ lsof -i:22
COMMAND   PID     USER   FD   TYPE             DEVICE   SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
sshd      521     root    3u  IPv6 0xffffffff89c67580        0t0  TCP *:ssh (LISTEN)
sshd     5090     root    3u  IPv6 0xffffffffa8668580   0t322598  TCP host.domain.com:ssh->21.43.65.87:52364 (ESTABLISHED)
sshd     5091   johngh    4u  IPv6 0xffffffffa8668580   0t322598  TCP host.domain.com:ssh->21.43.65.87:52364 (ESTABLISHED)

Which shows you exactly what you're asking for.

I had a problem yesterday with a crashed Jetty (Java) process, which only left 2 files in its /proc/[PID] directory (psinfo & usage).

pfiles failed to find the process (because the date it needed was not there)

lsof found it for me.