Ports "in use" permanently, even after reboot

Well, I ended up figuring out the solution…

[mpixel@server NodeApp]$ ls -la
total 140
drwxr-xr-x.  11 mpixel mpixel  4096 Aug  8 18:58  .
drwxr-xr-x.   6 mpixel mpixel   181 Aug  1 13:28  ..
srwxr-xr-x.   1 root root     0 Aug  8 12:50  0.0.0.0:443
srwxr-xr-x.   1 root root     0 Aug  8 12:50  0.0.0.0:80
srwxr-xr-x.   1 mpixel mpixel     0 Aug  8 14:05  0.0.0.0:8000
srwxr-xr-x.   1 mpixel mpixel     0 Aug  8 14:23  0.0.0.0:8001
srwxr-xr-x.   1 mpixel mpixel     0 Aug  8 14:38  0.0.0.0:8002
srwxr-xr-x.   1 mpixel mpixel     0 Aug  8 14:05  0.0.0.0:8443
srwxr-xr-x.   1 mpixel mpixel     0 Aug  8 14:23  0.0.0.0:8444
srwxr-xr-x.   1 mpixel mpixel     0 Aug  8 14:38  0.0.0.0:8445
srwxr-xr-x.   1 mpixel mpixel     0 Aug  8 14:56  0.0.0.0:9000
srwxr-xr-x.   1 mpixel mpixel     0 Aug  8 14:56  0.0.0.0:9001
srwxr-xr-x.   1 mpixel mpixel     0 Aug  8 15:42  0.0.0.0:9002
srwxr-xr-x.   1 mpixel mpixel     0 Aug  8 15:42  0.0.0.0:9003
srwxr-xr-x.   1 mpixel mpixel     0 Aug  8 16:05  192.168.23.77:8000
srwxr-xr-x.   1 mpixel mpixel     0 Aug  8 16:05  192.168.23.77:8443
srwxr-xr-x.   1 mpixel mpixel     0 Aug  8 16:46 '*:443'
srwxr-xr-x.   1 mpixel mpixel     0 Aug  8 16:46 '*:80'
...

Evidently, when given “0.0.0.0:####” as a port, Express / NodeJS will create a Unix socket on the filesystem, relative to the current working directory, and doesn’t clean it up. These can be simply removed with rm.

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