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

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 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?

5 Answers

What works for me:

killall tor 

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.

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

New solution: sudo killall tor

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

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.