Running a local port scan and found open ports but, don't know what they're used for?

Question

I wrote a very basic python script to port scan my system. I'm running linux-mint lisa:

open_ports = []
for port in xrange(65536):
    conn = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
    try:
        conn.connect(('localhost', port))
        open_ports.append(port)
        conn.close()
    except socket.error:
        pass

I returned a list of 7 ports and I ran netstat on each one:

sudo netstat -anlp | grep :(each port here)

I found that the first four were for cups, mysql, polipo, and tor but, the last three [44269, 46284, 47650] were much higher numbers and I didn't get anything back. I ran the script a few times more after this but, I would only return the first four.

Any ideas what they could be and what they're being used for?

Answer 1

Outbound traffic is normally sent with the higher ports. Your port scan happened while a tcp/udp session was in progress and ended before the sequential netstats