As a complete novice I'm currently using the 'ss' command to manually look for open ports on my system. I feel its important to manually do this whilst I'm learning how Linux works. As my experience and knowledge with this platform improves I will create specific scripts to complete tasks, but for now I would like to fully understand what it is these commands are actually doing. Other than the 'ss' command and netstat, is there an alternative that I am missing that I should really learn? I apreciate this is a basic and obvious question, but we all have to start somewhere.