pktstat

About

pktstat is a lightweight replacement for the ncurses-based pktstat. On Linux it uses AF_PACKET; on all other platforms it uses generic live PCAP capture. It requires no special or recent kernel features — AF_PACKET has been available since Linux v2.2 (1999) — and is fully compatible with other Unix platforms such as Darwin, where it falls back to generic PCAP.

At the end of execution, the program displays per-IP and per-protocol statistics (IPv4, IPv6, TCP, UDP, ICMPv4, and ICMPv6), sorted by per-connection bps, packet count, and (source-IP:port → destination-IP:port) tuples.

Note: pktstat with AF_PACKET handles up to several thousand packets per second without loss, but for higher traffic volumes consider the pktstat-bpf alternative. It is implemented as a Linux eBPF program, operates near wire-speed, and has no measurable impact on production systems.

Requirements

Capturing traffic typically requires root privileges. As an alternative, you can run pktstat as a regular user after granting it the necessary Linux capabilities:

$ setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin=eip pktstat

Usage

➜ ./pktstat --help
NAME
  pktstat
FLAGS
-?, --help                display help
-v, --add_vlan            if true, add VLAN header
-j, --json                if true, output in JSON format
--version             display program version
-s, --snaplen INT         snaplen (if <= 0 uses 65535) (default: 0)
-b, --bufsize INT         interface buffersize in MB (default: 8)
-f, --filter STRING       BPF filter
-i, --iface STRING        interface to read from (default: en0)
-t, --timeout DURATION    timeout for packet capture (default: 10m0s)
-l, --interval DURATION   interval between packet capture output (default: 0s)

By default, pktstat listens on all interfaces with no BPF filter applied. Use --iface to select a specific interface, and --filter to restrict captured traffic — for example, --filter "not port 22" to exclude SSH traffic.

--timeout stops the capture after the specified duration. You can also interrupt the program at any time with Ctrl-C, SIGTERM, or SIGINT.

--json outputs the traffic statistics as JSON instead of plain text.

--interval, when set to a value greater than zero and less than the timeout, causes the program to print statistics at that cadence until it exits.

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