I'm downloading the chain and I've processed more than 2 million blocks so far. I'm trying to attach to the geth console to view the syncing status, but I've tried typing geth console in another terminal (on Mac) and I get an error:
Fatal: Error starting protocol stack: listen udp :30303: bind: address already in use If I've understood correctly I should type geth console and then eth.syncing.
The error is most likely because the geth is already running and when you are trying to start another geth process using the same 30303 default port. If you know the datadir of the geth process which is downloading the chain, find a geth.ipc file in that datadir and use geth attach ipc:<geth.ipc path> to connect to the existing process.
cd ../.. and geth.ipc file should be present there. $ geth attach ipc:~/.ethereum/geth.ipc │······················································· Fatal: Unable to attach to remote geth: dial unix ~/.ethereum/geth.ipc: connect: no such fi│······················································· le or directory If you are using linux then go to terminal and run the following commands:
$ netstat -p || grep 30303 $ kill -9 `process id` 
| (pipe) rather than || (or). Also, please don't use kill with -9. It equates to a SIGKILL, which means "kill the process immediately". If your Geth instance is currently writing to disk, you're asking for a corrupt database... Use a signal that can be caught by Geth's signal handlers (e.g. SIGINT using kill -INT <pid>).