Port 60874 — The Unassigned Ephemeral Port

What This Port Belongs To

Port 60874 lives in the ephemeral port range: 49152-65535. ¹ These are the numbers the Internet reserves for temporary use, dynamically allocated by your operating system when applications need to open outbound connections.

This range exists because well-known ports (0-1023) and registered ports (1024-49151) are scarce. If every web browser, email client, and API call had to fight over a fixed set of port numbers, the system would collapse. Instead, the Internet outsourced the problem: here are 16,384 temporary addresses. Use them. Give them back when you're done.

No Official Service

Port 60874 has no assigned service. ² It's not registered with IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). It won't show up in any official protocols documentation. There are no standards documents defining what should run here.

That's the point. Unassigned ports are intentionally left open for applications to use temporarily. Your web browser might use port 60874 for an outbound connection one moment, and port 60875 the next. The operating system doesn't care—it just needs a free address for that conversation.

If You See This Port Listening

If you find something listening on port 60874, it's almost certainly temporary. It might be:

• A client application connecting outbound (your side of the connection)
• A server application using a dynamic port instead of a well-known one
• A service in the middle of a connection that will release this port when done

To check what's using it:

On Linux/macOS:

lsof -i :60874
sudo netstat -tulpn | grep 60874
ss -tulpn | grep 60874

On Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :60874
Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort 60874

These commands show you the process ID and application name holding the port.

Why Unassigned Ports Matter

Unassigned ports represent freedom. They're the breathing room that keeps the Internet functional. Without them, every simultaneous connection would need its own permanent port number—an impossible constraint.

The 49152-65535 range exists because someone in the early days of TCP/IP understood this: you can't predict what future applications will need. Better to give them a library of temporary addresses than to try to assign specific ports to every possible use case.

Port 60874 will probably never run a famous protocol. It's not famous or important. It's just infrastructure—invisible, shared, temporary. And that's exactly what makes it essential.

See Also

• Port 22 (SSH) - What unassigned ports were created to complement
• Port 1024 - The boundary between well-known and registered ports
• RFC 6335 - The official document defining port ranges and assignment policies ³