netstat commands for Windows, Linux, and Mac at a glance

If you want to obtain in­form­a­tion about the network status using netstat commands, you only need to access the command line tool of your operating system in order to do this. In Windows, Linux, and macOS, the procedure required for this differs, as does the ap­plic­a­tion of some netstat commands in the re­spect­ive operating system.

In all common operating systems, both netstat and a cor­res­pond­ing command line tool for running the network service are available by default. In Windows systems you use the well-es­tab­lished command prompt, in Linux dis­tri­bu­tions and on Mac devices you use the terminal.

You can then type any netstat command directly into the command prompt and confirm with the Enter key.

As a Linux user, you enter netstat commands in the terminal. In the popular dis­tri­bu­tion Ubuntu, there is a factory-assigned key com­bin­a­tion to access netstat:

Once the terminal is open, you can execute the desired netstat commands.

The terminal is also the command line tool of choice on Mac devices when it comes to executing netstat commands. You have two con­veni­ent options for accessing it: The Spotlight Search and the ‘Utilities’ menu.

Using Spotlight search works as follows:

1. Open the Spotlight Search by clicking on the mag­ni­fy­ing glass icon in the menu bar or using the key com­bin­a­tion [Cmd] + [Space].
2. Enter ‘Terminal’ in the search field.
3. Start the tool by double-clicking on the cor­res­pond­ing search result.

Via the Utilities menu, start the terminal as follows:

1. Switch to your desktop.
2. Click on the ‘Go to’ item in the menu bar.
3. Select ‘Utilities’.
4. Open the terminal by double-clicking on the cor­res­pond­ing entry.

Many netstat commands are ap­plic­able across systems, since syntax and required para­met­ers do not differ. Here and there, however, there are dif­fer­ences in the commands in Windows, Linux, and macOS. In the following tables we have listed all the important netstat commands for the in­di­vidu­al systems.

With the help of the in­di­vidu­al para­met­ers from the above tables you can check the status of the active con­nec­tions and open or closed ports and in­ter­faces in detail. Of course, you can also combine different netstat commands directly with each other, as in the following cross-system example:

By combining the -a and -n para­met­ers, you auto­mat­ic­ally get the status of all active and inactive sockets, with all addresses rendered in numeric form.