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Billal Begueradj
Asked: 2016-10-05 08:33:11 +0800 CST

Could not bind to 127.0.0.1:9050: Address already in use. Is Tor already running?

  • 772

I installed Tor this way:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/tor-browser
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tor-browser

I run today in Terminal this: $ tor and I got this error message:

Oct 04 19:24:04.461 [notice] Tor v0.2.7.6 (git-605ae665009853bd) running on Linux with Libevent 2.0.21-stable, OpenSSL 1.0.2g and Zlib 1.2.8.
Oct 04 19:24:04.461 [notice] Tor can't help you if you use it wrong! Learn how to be safe at https://www.torproject.org/download/download#warning
Oct 04 19:24:04.517 [notice] Read configuration file "/etc/tor/torrc".
Oct 04 19:24:04.574 [notice] Opening Socks listener on 127.0.0.1:9050
Oct 04 19:24:04.574 [warn] Could not bind to 127.0.0.1:9050: Address already in use. Is Tor already running?
Oct 04 19:24:04.575 [warn] Failed to parse/validate config: Failed to bind one of the listener ports.
Oct 04 19:24:04.575 [err] Reading config failed--see warnings above.

How to fix this?

16.04

5 Answers

  1. What works for me:

    killall tor
    • 29

  2. netstat will tell you what's listening on that port. Open a terminal (press Ctrl+Alt+T), and run:

    sudo netstat -plnt | fgrep 9050

    It will tell you which program is using that port. For example, on my system, it shows:

    tcp       0     0 127.0.0.1:9050         0.0.0.0:*              LISTEN     1198/tor

    At the end, it says that the program listening on that port is tor.

    • 16

  3. @David Foerster's answer: killall tor did not work for me.
    I got the result tor: no process found.

    New solution: sudo killall tor

    • 6

  4. For 20.04 install and run tor-browser the next way:

    sudo apt install torbrowser-launcher
torbrowser-launcher

    If you want to use tor command, than use systemctl to handle its service:

    sudo systemctl start tor
sudo systemctl stop tor
systemctl status tor

    After a tor service stopping, you could run it with a tor command.

    You could also use it as a proxy, but it is not so easy.

    • 1

  5. restart your device and run again. port will be realse.

    • 0