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Developer Tips Vol I - Kill Process

I have plenty of developer tips that I’ve picked up over the years. They’ve been sitting in my notes, too long for a tweet but too short for a blog post.

So, I’m turning them into a “Dev Tips” series, right from the trenches. First up: killing processes from the command line.

While running processes, especially in VS Code, I often encounter this issue:

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This lingers even after I’ve closed all terminal instances.

To cancel any orphaned running processes, use the netstat or lsof commands, depending on your platform.

Windows Command Prompt

netstat -ano | findstr :3000 taskkill /PID <pid> /F

Here, 3000 is the port we are checking, and pid is the process ID returned by the netstat command.

PowerShell (requires elevation)

netstat -a -b -n -o | find "3000" Stop-Process <pid>

Mac OS

lsof -i :3000 kill -9 <pid>

Published Jan 20, 2025

London-based Lead Software Engineer with a passion for frontend development, gaming, and all things tech