netsniff-ng/netsniff-ng

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1421 stars · 256 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

netsniff-ng is a free, high-performance Linux networking toolkit written in C, often described as a Swiss army knife for network packets. It uses zero-copy mechanisms (RX_RING/TX_RING) for fast packet capture, replay, and generation, and bundles utilities like trafgen, ifpps, flowtop, astraceroute, and bpfc.

Use cases

• capture packets to pcap files with zero-copy performance on Linux
• replay pcap captures onto a network interface
• generate high-volume network traffic for testing
• compile Berkeley Packet Filters for sniffing
• monitor kernel networking statistics in a top-like view
• trace routes with autonomous system information
• inspect netfilter connection tracking live
• debug and audit network protocols

When to choose

• you need maximum packet capture or generation throughput on Linux via zero-copy
• you want a multi-tool CLI suite for network debugging, auditing, or reconnaissance
• you work with pcap files and need fast capture/replay without a GUI
• you need BPF filter compilation and disassembly tooling

When to avoid

• you need a graphical packet analyzer like Wireshark
• you are on a non-Linux platform (it is Linux-only)
• you need the experimental tools (mausezahn, curvetun) in production
• you want a high-level API or library to embed in applications

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

networking security developer-tools monitoring networking security developer-tools cli packet-sniffer packet-generator packet-capture zero-copy pcap bpf network-analysis network-toolkit trafgen traceroute command-line linux

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