Purinda Gunasekara

How to check if a Port is open or not in C (Unix/Linux)

· #c-cpp #linux · 1 min read

Thought of posting this script as I found this useful to embed in any socket based programs to figure out if a port is open or not in a certain host.
Tested on a Linux box and appears to be working fine.

Localhost and port 22 is hard coded into the snippet.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>
#include <netdb.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    int portno     = 22;
    char *hostname = "localhost;

    int sockfd;
    struct sockaddr_in serv_addr;
    struct hostent *server;

    sockfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
    if (sockfd < 0) {
        error("ERROR opening socket");
    }

    server = gethostbyname(hostname);

    if (server == NULL) {
        fprintf(stderr,"ERROR, no such host\n");
        exit(0);
    }

    bzero((char *) &serv_addr, sizeof(serv_addr));
    serv_addr.sin_family = AF_INET;
    bcopy((char *)server->h_addr,
         (char *)&serv_addr.sin_addr.s_addr,
         server->h_length);

    serv_addr.sin_port = htons(portno);
    if (connect(sockfd,(struct sockaddr *) &serv_addr,sizeof(serv_addr)) < 0) {
        printf("Port is closed");
    } else {
        printf("Port is active");
    }

    close(sockfd);
    return 0;
}