the-tcpdump-group/libpcap

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

3163 stars · 948 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

libpcap is a system-independent C/C++ library providing a portable API for user-level network packet capture, with BPF-based filtering and pcap/pcapng file support. It is the foundational library behind tools like tcpdump and Wireshark.

Use cases

• capture network packets in a C program
• write a packet sniffer
• filter traffic with BPF expressions
• save captured packets to pcap files
• monitor network traffic for security analysis
• read and parse pcapng capture files
• collect network statistics

When to choose

• you need portable low-level packet capture across Linux, BSD, macOS, or Windows
• you are building network monitoring, IDS, or traffic analysis tools
• you want the de facto standard pcap API with mature BPF filtering

When to avoid

• you need high-level protocol analysis rather than raw capture
• you want eBPF-based kernel filtering on Linux, which libpcap does not support
• you need a ready-made packet analyzer GUI like Wireshark instead of a library

Facets

library · maturity stable

networking security monitoring sdk networking security developer-tools operating-systems windows bsd cross-platform c packet-capture pcap pcapng bpf packet-filtering sniffer network-monitoring traffic-analysis linux macos

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="the-tcpdump-group/libpcap")