Gregg's MOTD

Tips & Tricks that I've Encountered Over the Years...

Test If a Port is Open with Bash

July 18, 2023 — Gregg Szumowski

If netcat isn’t available on your machine and you don’t have the priviledge to install it you can use this trick to test if a port is open or not. It will throw a connection refused message if a port is closed.

$ : </dev/tcp/127.0.0.1/80

And you can use it in a script like this:

(: </dev/tcp/127.0.0.1/80) &>/dev/null && echo "OPEN" || echo "CLOSED"

Tags: cli, networking, bash, motd