the-tcpdump-group/tcpdump

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

3232 stars · 932 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

tcpdump is a powerful command-line packet analyzer that captures and dissects network traffic using libpcap, with BPF-based filtering and support for pcap/pcapng files. It runs on a wide range of Unix-like systems and Windows, and is widely used for network monitoring, debugging, and security auditing.

Use cases

• capture and inspect network packets from a network interface
• troubleshoot network connectivity issues by analyzing traffic
• filter traffic with BPF expressions to isolate specific protocols or hosts
• save packet captures to pcap files for later analysis
• audit network traffic for security investigations
• decode protocol details of captured packets

When to choose

• you need a battle-tested, scriptable CLI packet sniffer on servers or Unix systems
• you want deep protocol dissection of captured traffic
• you need to read or filter pcap/pcapng capture files
• you are doing network troubleshooting, auditing, or security analysis from the terminal

When to avoid

• you need a GUI for interactive packet exploration (use Wireshark instead)
• you need programmatic packet capture APIs in your own application (use libpcap directly)
• you need wireless-specific analysis like WiFi channel hopping or decryption

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

networking security developer-tools parser networking security developer-tools windows bsd cli cross-platform packet-capture packet-analyzer pcap pcapng bpf sniffer protocol-dissector network-troubleshooting libpcap command-line linux macos

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