“wcap is a packet snif­fer that dis­plays URLs. It is is an appli­ca­tion that puts your eth­er­net inter­face in promis­cu­ous mode and lis­tens for web requests, dis­play­ing a nicely for­mat­ted list of URLs that have been requested. The infor­ma­tion it obtains is not mag­i­cal and is the same sort of stuff you can get from run­ning tcpdump–it is just specif­i­cally parsed and for­mat­ted to make the requested URLs avail­able at a glance.”

Simi­lar to Ether­PEG (which Kim is fond of call­ing Ether PIG), which I used over the week­end at the hotel, I’ve released wcap.  While Ether­PEG shows pic­tures, wcap shows URLs.  There are a mil­lion other clones of this kind of func­tion­al­ity out there (I’ve writ­ten much the same many times before in shell scripts with tcp­dump and grep/sed/awk.) This par­tic­u­lar app and source code is being released to the Cre­ative Com­mons because I did the work and thought I should share.  I did the work because I needed to reac­quaint myself with the libp­cap inter­face for an upcom­ing project at work.  It sniffs the net­work for web requests and extracts out the URLs being requested.  It is not really rocket sci­ence, but does seem to amaze and con­fuse those that are not famil­iar with net­work protocols.

See also: wmap

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Tagged as: etherpeg, opensource, wcap, wmap