What it does
prt is a keyboard-driven terminal interface for inspecting network connections. It shows a live connection table that refreshes every two seconds. New connections appear in green. Closed connections appear dimmed red and stay visible for five seconds. You can filter the table by port, process, protocol, state, service, process ID or user. Opening a process shows its command line, parent tree, CPU use, memory use, open files and related connections. A topology view shows each process, its local port and its remote endpoint as a terminal tree. The SSH section reads hosts from the SSH configuration file and lets you create, edit, restart and save tunnels. Scanning and navigation are read-only. You can install prt with Cargo, with Homebrew, or from DEB and RPM packages on Linux.
Capabilities
- Exports one JSON or CSV snapshot, or streams NDJSON continuously.
- Watch mode gives a compact UP or DOWN monitor for selected ports, for example prt watch 3000 5432 8080.
- Built-in heuristics flag suspicious listeners, and typing ! or suspicious filters the table to them.
- Shows the owning Docker or Podman container when one is detected.
- Configurable alerts match on port, process, state or connections_gt and can ring the terminal bell or highlight the entry.
When to use it
- Investigating a port conflict.
- Watching a small set of development ports.
- Saving a snapshot for comparison or incident notes.
