What does 0.0.0.0:* mean in netstat

netstatudp

Could anyone explain the following output of netstat -plunt?

udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:58262           0.0.0.0:*  1163/avahi-daemon:    
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:17500           0.0.0.0:*  3779/dropbox:u    
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:5353            0.0.0.0:*  1163/avahi-daemon:

What does 0.0.0.0:* mean? Are all the ports being listened or something else?

Best Answer

The column after local address is "Foreign Address" - as these are UDP ports, and listening ports, there is no foreign address so a wildcard is shown.

I'm not sure if this would show the other end(s) if packets had been received as UDP is a connectionless protocol. Also as one-many comms is allowed a single foreign address could be misleading. So it may ALWAYS show the wildcard for udp.

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