The netstat
Linux command is used by system administrators to see information about network connections. Netstat is a powerful utility that can print network connections, routing tables, interface statistics, masquerade connections, and multicast memberships. It has been superseded by the ss command in recent years so you may get the “bash: netstat: command not found” error, but is still a viable tool for network diagnostics and troubleshooting.
The error bash: netstat: command not found
will occur on up to date Ubuntu and Debian Linux systems when trying to execute the netstat
command, as it is no longer included by default. In this tutorial, you will learn how to install the net-tools
package on Ubuntu and Debian-based Linux systems, which provides access to the netstat
command, among others.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to install
net-tools
on Debian and Ubuntu

Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
---|---|
System | Ubuntu and Debian |
Software | net-tools |
Other | Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. |
Conventions | # – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user |
bash: netstat: command not found – Debian/Ubuntu Linux
The
ss
command replaced the older netstat
command on Linux. See our tutorial on Using ss command on Linux to see usage examples for the ss
command and learn how it differs from netstat
.If you are looking for the netstat command and getting error:
bash: netstat: command not found
This simply means that the relevant package net-tools
which includes netstat
executable is not installed, thus missing. The package net-tools
may not be installed on your system by default so you need to install it manually.
The package also includes aditional utilisties such as arp
, ifconfig
, netstat
, rarp
, nameif
and route
.
To make netstat
available on your system simply install the net-tools
package using the below command:
$ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install net-tools
Using netstat command on Debian/Ubuntu Linux
Now that netstat
is installed on your system, you can use some of the commands below to get started using it.
- First, let’s view the processes that are listening for connections. To do so so enter the following command.
$ sudo netstat -tulpen
- Now let’s take a look at all of the current network connections. To do this enter the following command, which is similar to the previous one except that we use
-a
to view all sockets instead of-l
to just view listening sockets.$ sudo netstat -atupen
- You may find yourself in a situation where you only want to view the
ESTABLISHED
connections. This is as easy as piping the output of netstat to grep like so.$ sudo netstat -atupen | grep ESTABLISHED
- The netstat’s
-i
option brings up a table listing all configured network interfaces on the system:$ sudo netstat -i
For more examples and tips on other networking tools, see our tutorials on How to monitor network activity on a Linux system and Learning Linux Commands: netstat.

Closing Thoughts
In this tutorial, we saw how to install the missing
netstat
command on an Ubuntu or other Debian based Linux system. We also learned some basic usage of the netstat
command in order to get started using it. You will also want to look into the ss
command, which supersedes netstat
but has a separate syntax.