Package: pcapfix (1.1.7-1)

repairs broken pcap and pcapng files

libpcap (Packet CAPture) provides a portable framework for low-level network monitoring. Network dumps based on libpcap can be made by tcpdump, wireshark and other tools. Sometimes those dumps can get corrupted by several reasons. Examples of this are a copy from Linux to Windows with a conversion to DOS/ Windows text file line ending (CR-LF) or a transfer over FTP in ASCII mode instead of BINARY mode.

pcapfix tries to repair your broken pcap files, fixing the global header and recovering the packets by searching and guessing the packet headers.

pcapfix will first step through the packets top down until it recognizes a corrupted one by using plausibility checks. After that the tool will brute force further pcap packet headers by reading the file byte by byte. If another proper packet is found, pcapfix restores the data in between by adding a well-formed pcap packet header.

The PCAP Next Generation Dump File Format (or pcapng for short) is an attempt to overcome the limitations of the currently widely used (but limited) libpcap format. Since 1.0.0 version, pcapfix works with pcapng format too.