ngrep VS libpcap

Compare ngrep vs libpcap and see what are their differences.

ngrep

ngrep is like GNU grep applied to the network layer. It's a PCAP-based tool that allows you to specify an extended regular or hexadecimal expression to match against data payloads of packets. It understands many kinds of protocols, including IPv4/6, TCP, UDP, ICMPv4/6, IGMP and Raw, across a wide variety of interface types, and understands BPF filter logic in the same fashion as more common packet sniffing tools, such as tcpdump and snoop. (by jpr5)

libpcap

the LIBpcap interface to various kernel packet capture mechanism (by the-tcpdump-group)
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ngrep libpcap
2 10
847 2,514
- 1.9%
0.0 9.6
7 months ago 7 days ago
C C
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

ngrep

Posts with mentions or reviews of ngrep. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects.

libpcap

Posts with mentions or reviews of libpcap. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-12-26.
  • How do remote interfaces work in wireshark?
    1 project | /r/wireshark | 7 Jun 2023
    As long as your custom service used the rpcap protocol I'd expect it to be possible. You may find this GitHub page informative, since it includes some rpcap source code and one of the main Wireshark developers appears to be a contributor there.
  • How to reverse engineer a JSON API on a single page application
    3 projects | dev.to | 26 Dec 2022
    mitmproxy can be used to find the HTTP request with the needed data in addition browser dev tools. At some point, I'll explore tcpdump and wireshark to reverse engineer websites for web scraping and share the learnings with you.
  • Chibicc – A Small C Compiler
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Nov 2022
    (Of course, this consideration should be appropriately downweighted by YAGNI, as threading memory management through prototype or internal utility code can by itself easily force it into very non-prototype amounts of effort.)

    [1] https://github.com/the-tcpdump-group/libpcap/blob/2180b6e56a...

  • Question re C interop, type, for use with std.mem
    1 project | /r/Zig | 23 Oct 2022
    I am working with libpcap, a library that parses packets captured from tcpdump, which I have cIncluded from Zig.
  • Implement DevSecOps to Secure your CI/CD pipeline
    54 projects | dev.to | 27 Sep 2022
    Nmap and Wireshark, tcpdump tools can be used to scan networks and packets.
  • Working on Net+, Need Some Direction
    1 project | /r/ITCareerQuestions | 4 Sep 2022
    Also definitely start looking at tcpdump and wireshark. These are invaluable tools for the non-network engineer that is perhaps a sysadmin or analyst to use for network troubleshooting.
  • Modding
    1 project | /r/kotor | 11 Jul 2022
    For future reference, libpcap is a library that Wireshark and many other network analysis tools use to record network traffic. It has its own file format that it can use to save the recorded network traffic to disk.
  • All About Libpas, Phil's Super Fast Malloc
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jun 2022
  • Linux Debugging
    1 project | /r/devops | 6 Apr 2022
    A lot is covered here and here, sar might be useful, getfacl and tcpdump and probably hundred more tools I am not even aware of. The easiest to learn those is to have a problem and identify and solve it with those tools, but to do that you need to know roughly what those tools can do.
  • Gain Visibility into Istio mTLS Traffic with Mizu
    4 projects | /r/golang | 30 Mar 2022
    For example, gopacket uses libpcap by default for capturing the traffic. Libpcap doesn't support network namespaces and we can't ask it to listen to traffic on a different namespace. However, we can change the network namespace of the calling thread and then start libpcap to see the traffic on a different namespace.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ngrep and libpcap you can also consider the following projects:

tcpdump - the TCPdump network dissector

npcap - Nmap Project's Windows packet capture and transmission library

ChameleonMini - The ChameleonMini is a versatile contactless smartcard emulator compliant to NFC. The ChameleonMini was developed by https://kasper-oswald.de. The device is available at https://shop.kasper.it. For further information see the Getting Started Page https://rawgit.com/emsec/ChameleonMini/master/Doc/Doxygen/html/_page__getting_started.html or the Wiki tab above.

esp_wifi_repeater - A full functional WiFi Repeater (correctly: a WiFi NAT Router)

gopacket - Provides packet processing capabilities for Go

proxmark3 - Iceman Fork - Proxmark3

mimalloc-bench - Suite for benchmarking malloc implementations.

DDOS-RootSec - DDOS Archive by RootSec (Scanners, BotNets (Mirai and QBot Premium & Normal and more), Exploits, Methods, Sniffers)

WebKit - Home of the WebKit project, the browser engine used by Safari, Mail, App Store and many other applications on macOS, iOS and Linux.

prometheus - The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database.

mizu - The API traffic viewer for Kubernetes providing deep visibility into all API traffic and payloads going in, out and across containers and pods inside a Kubernetes cluster. Think TCPDump and Wireshark re-invented for Kubernetes [Moved to: https://github.com/kubeshark/kubeshark]